Photo: Teresa Grau Ros (CC BY-SA 4.0)
In late autumn this tree drops what look like green brains onto the path.
Osage Orange
Every autumn these trees drop green spheres the size of a grapefruit that nothing alive wants to eat. This page maps every osage orange on the site, 6 so far across 5 cities.
The fruit of Maclura pomifera looks like a brain, weighs a kilo or more and seems to have been built for animals that vanished from North America thousands of years ago. The tree takes its name from the Osage nation, who made bows from the wood, which is dense and springy and was traded far beyond their own territory. American farmers then found a second use: planted close and cut back, osage orange grows into a thorn hedge nothing can push through, and thousands of miles of it went in through the 1850s until barbed wire made it pointless. All four here are curiosities in European parks, two in Barcelona and one each in Lyon and Toulouse. Stand under one in November and watch your head.
Barcelona
Before barbed wire, this tree was the fence.
Lyon
Photo: Krzysztof Golik (CC BY 4.0)
This tree's American ancestors were weapons before they were shade.
Caserta
The best bow wood in North America grows in a royal garden outside Naples.
Melbourne
Yarra Boulevard was built to give men work during the Depression.
Toulouse
This tree drops fruit that nothing alive is meant to eat.
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