The Upright Osage Orange of the English Garden

The best bow wood in North America grows in a royal garden outside Naples. Maclura pomifera takes its English name from the Osage nation, whose bows were traded far beyond their own country, and the wood behind that reputation is heavy, springy and so rot-resistant that a fence post cut from it outlasts the fence. Before barbed wire, American farmers planted the tree in thorny hedgerows across thousands of miles of the Midwest. The fruit is the reason to come in autumn. Each one is the size of a grapefruit, green, wrinkled like a brain, heavy enough to be worth not parking under, full of sticky white latex and eaten by almost nothing alive. One well-argued theory holds that its dispersers were the mastodons and giant ground sloths that disappeared from North America some thirteen thousand years ago, which would make every fruit dropped here an offer to a customer who no longer exists. They come down through September and October and lie where they land. Two Osage oranges in this garden hold monumental status, and the register describes this one as the upright specimen: two metres sixty around the trunk, twenty-five metres tall, and about two hundred years old by the register's estimate. Taken at face value that puts it within thirty years of the garden's creation in 1786, which would make it one of the older residents of a collection built almost entirely out of foreigners.