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.