ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, July 15, 1996 TAG: 9607150027
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Monty S. Leitch
SOURCE: MONTY S. LEITCH
IN THE back yard of my parents' home stood an Osage orange tree.
Of course, that's not what we called it. We called it "the bomb tree," or the hedge-apple, both names referring to the tree's two-fisted-size, yellow-green fruits, which we spent afternoons heaving down the hill and into the woods.
Was there any other use for those things? Well, sometimes we threw them at each other. And sometimes we tried cutting them up for "stews" in our playhouse.
But "they're not good to eat," Papa said, and I wasn't the kind of kid who tested the authenticity of such pronouncements. I would no more have tasted a slice of hedge-apple than I would have nibbled the wild onions or cedar knots that also went into our "stews." (Although I'd be willing to bet that there are living today more than a few Fincastle kids who know the taste of hedge-apples.)
I was reminded of our hedge-apple last week when I saw an Osage orange, ready to drop its fruit, near Amherst. "Whatever happened to that tree in our back yard?" I wondered. "Is there any other use for those things?" It turns out that Osage orange was once a widely used and useful tree. I've learned this from a friend's book, "Shake Them 'Simmons Down and Other Adventures in the Lives of Trees," by Janet Lembke, forthcoming from Lyons & Burford Publishers next month.
Lembke has titled her essay on the Osage orange "A History of Obsolescence." Maclura pomifera is probably native to Arkansas and Oklahoma, but it's been so widely planted that it now grows throughout the eastern and northwestern states, including near Amherst and in Fincastle, and in many other places you can name.
In Midwestern states, where lumber for fences was hard to come by, Osage orange once was planted in thick, fence-like hedges - hence the name "hedge-apple." And since it is a member of the mulberry family, its leaves have been used to feed silk worms.
Its wood made fine bows for the Osage, when they still hunted buffalo; its trunks made hardy fence posts; and its bark was once a primary dye for hues in the yellow family.
But what use for the bomb trees now? Children heave the fruits over hills and into woods. They roll them down asphalt driveways and into streets, to see the mush car tires will make of them. They lob them at each other, and at their dogs. Who, being dogs, chase them mindlessly into creeks.
Try to get rid of a hedge-apple tree and, Lembke writes, it goes "wild, sending up new shoots, creating great thickets, running over property lines without the slightest regard" for the humans who first planted it, and who now want it gone.
"Nobody plants Hedge these days," she says. "The current thrust ... is toward eradication. Hedge has gone the way of bow wood, dye making, and fodder for silkworms. Like them, it fills no contemporary needs.
"But try telling that to an Osage orange. It's only the tree's human uses that have suffered obsolescence. The tree itself thrives." She ends "by giving praise to Osage orange's rooted stubbornness. In its own vital terms, the species will not - cannot - become obsolete. Obsolescence is a human conceit anyhow, and one that's not available to treekind."
Perhaps. But humans who pronounce obsolescence seem determined to move rapidly on to extermination. Whatever the cost.
What use for the Osage orange? Who are we to say?
Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times columnist.
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