Ack! By my count, I have got eleven more days before winter's official debut. That's eleven days to finish this project. Although I haven't posted anything for it in a bit, and although the days are becoming decidedly wintery, I haven't forgotten about it when I've been out and about and away from Flickr. So I'll dig through the last few weeks of photos for some of my favorites from late fall.
This here is an osage orange tree. Its fruits are called osage oranges or hedge apples (or a whole slew of other things: horse apple, mock orange, or, and this is my personal favorite, monkey balls) and they appear in late summer. They were originally planted very close together as living fences or hedges on farms in northern Texas and southern Oklahoma, before the invention of barbed wire. The wood is very strong, the branches are thorned, and the trees were aggressively pruned to promote dense growth. I read somewhere that the fences made with these trees were meant to be "horse high, bull strong, and hog tight." I love that!
The fruits aren't really edible by us humans, but are said to have roach- and spider-repelling properties. The first osage oranges I ever saw were at the Union Square farmers market in New York City, and I brought one back and tucked it away in a corner of my Queens kitchen during a roach episode ... and I don't have much conclusive to say about that experiment. The fruits are wacky and wonderful to look at, though!
This particular tree sits along the south pond that I drove past every day on my way to feed the chickens and collect eggs. In autumn the grapefruit-sized fruits start plopping to the ground, looking bizarre and beautiful, and making a very satisfying woody splat! when you drive over them.
I took this photo, of a few hangers-onners, just a few weeks ago. They look pretty surreal up there in the skeleton tree.
I love this ode to them, a poem by Nancy Fitz-Gerald Viens. I hope she won't mind my posting it here.
"Horse Apples"
Tail end of a ragtag summer,
Horse apple time in Texas
When heat lifts its heavy hand
Briefly from my shoulder, and
The sun sinks like a golden balloon
Behind Longhorn Meadow.
Green globes of luminescent Day-Glo
Big as Texas grapefruit
Lie in the Bermuda grass,
Hefty enough for small boys
To chunk at tree trunks or a passing car
With a satisfying "thunk."
Lumpy, ludicrous fruit
You broadcast the possibility
Of autumn once again,
The possibility of cool nights
Under a down comforter,
The possibility of a giant twist
In the atmosphere, a hurricane
To stir up dregs of my lethargic soul
Worn down by one hundred degree heat--
The great, gigantic, final possibility
Of rain.
Copyright © 1997 by Nancy Fitz-Gerald Viens. All rights reserved.
View 4 more comments
wesley jeanne 54 months ago | reply
Wonderful. I love the poem. My Grandpa had "horse apples" on the edge of his pasture, but I never knew they were actually osage oranges.
patpresent 54 months ago | reply
This brings back memories of my growing up years in the Magnolia Hill section of Levittown. All of the streets began with "M" and were the names of bushes and trees. Every house had the particular bush/tree planted in the yard to coincide with the street name. This comment is becoming long winded and not very articulate but I did want you to know that all the houses on Mock Orange Lane had osage orange trees in their yards...as we had magnolias. I wonder how many "M" street names I could remember.
molly | roots + wings 54 months ago | reply
I used to teach a short story called "The Osage Orange Tree" and couldn't figure out how the heck to pronounce it until I found the story read on CD. We tried the hedge balls in our kitchen because we are prone to those sweet little fruit flies (darn composting--need to get better at that!) but we just ended up having murky looking gross green things.
CameliaTWU 44 months ago | reply
Hi, I'm an admin for a group called Moraceae, and we'd love to have this added to the group!