The Osage Orange of Yarra Boulevard
Yarra Boulevard was built to give men work during the Depression. The tree beside it was already seventy years old. The Victorian Heritage Database's citation for the Boulevard Parklands records an Osage orange north-east of the point where the road meets Swan Street and dates it to the 1860s, which makes it around 160 now. Nothing else here has been dated that far back. The City of Yarra's register lists one at that spot too: 27 metres tall, 169 centimetres of diameter at breast height, about 5.31 metres of girth once converted, since the register gives the width across a trunk rather than the distance around it. Nobody has matched the two records trunk to trunk, but Osage orange is rare enough here that they almost certainly describe the same tree. The height is the odd part. Maclura pomifera is a thorny, low, awkward thing in its native Red River country of Texas and Oklahoma, and it rarely gets far past 20 metres anywhere. This one reached 27 on a river flat in Melbourne. Its wood is so dense and rot-resistant that Osage fence posts routinely outlast the wire stapled to them, which is part of why a tree from a small corner of America ended up on four continents. The road, by comparison, is barely ninety.
In fruit
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Yarra Boulevard, near the Swan Street connection, Yarra Bend Park, Burnley VIC 3121You can recognise it by its unusual height, 27 metres, for a species that is normally low, thorny and awkward. It stands on Yarra Boulevard, near the Swan Street connection.
Free, always open. Public parkland along Yarra Boulevard, part of Yarra Bend Park / the Boulevard Parklands, a well-used shared walking and cycling corridor along the Yarra River.
No tram or train stop immediately adjacent. Reachable via the Yarra River shared path or Yarra Boulevard itself; the nearest railway stations (Burnley, Victoria Park, or East Richmond) are roughly 2km away by path.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
- In the official register: City of Yarra Significant Trees register, no. 227
- City of Yarra Significant Trees register (, ref 227)
- Victorian Heritage Database, 'The Boulevard Parklands' citation (vhd.heritagecouncil.vic.gov.au/places/103863), cited via search: an Osage Orange '…