The Osage Orange of the Grand Rond

This tree drops fruit that nothing alive is meant to eat. The Osage orange produces heavy green spheres the size of a grapefruit, wrinkled like a brain and full of sticky latex, and no native North American animal disperses them. The standing explanation is that the animals which did, mammoths and giant ground sloths among them, went extinct around thirteen thousand years ago, and the tree has been dropping its fruit into an empty niche ever since. It got a second career from people instead. Osage orange wood is dense, springy and almost rot-proof, the timber the Osage nation made bows from, and American farmers planted it by the million in the nineteenth century as living fence, until barbed wire arrived and made it redundant in about a decade. Toulouse has one on its remarkable tree list near the Boulingrin, at the edge of the Grand Rond. The register gives the species and the position and nothing else, no age and no measurements, and no independent source names this specific tree, so what is documented is that the city looked at it and marked it out. Standing in front of one, that is easy enough to believe. The bark alone is worth the detour, deep orange-brown and fissured into long twisting ridges.