The Osage Orange of the Tête d'Or

This tree's American ancestors were weapons before they were shade. Maclura pomifera is named for the Osage nation of the central United States, who prized its wood, dense, springy and rot-resistant, for war bows and arrows above almost any other timber available to them. The species reached Europe in 1823, and French growers in the south of the country initially planted it not for its odd, wrinkled, inedible fruit but as living fencing and, briefly, as a food source for silkworms before mulberry proved more practical. This specimen in the Tête d'Or's arboretum has grown into something closer to a specimen tree than a hedge. A dendrologist's survey put its girth at 3.70 metres a metre above the ground, with a trunk described as ridged and hollowed over some two metres of its height, reasonably read as the marks of a genuinely old, over-a-century specimen rather than a fast-growing recent planting. Osage orange also spreads by layering, sending down roots wherever a low branch touches soil, so what looks like one tree in a dense stand may in places be a single genetic individual repeating itself.