A Sage On Osage

“I gave up trying to find the answer to this one and was hoping you could pass it along to one of your crack specialists.”

So started an email with photo received this chilly November.  It is just such tantalizing inquiries which make me appreciate my job.

“If you can’t ID it, I’m gonna call it a maggot ball.  It has a fragrance to it.  It’s about the size of a softball.  Do you think it would spice up the stuffing on Thanksgiving?”

Luckily, I had grown up around maggot balls in rural New Jersey, but we called them monkey oranges.  The yellow-green fruits fell out of scrubby, thorn-laden trees in old hedgerows and along roads.  To my young mind, their most amazing attribute was the texture of their skins, which mimics most alarmingly the surface of a human brain.  This youthful exposure to the trees allowed my own grey cells to easily provide some answers.

Botanical thinkers know this plant as Osage orange, or Maclura pomifera.  Planted nationwide as living fences before the invention of barbed wire, this species is native to the Red River valley in southern Oklahoma and northern Texas.   In that locale, they commonly grow under a bevy of odd names, including hedgeapples, horse apples, or hedge balls.  Since there are separate male and female trees, only the females will develop the balls.  I’ll leave the rest to your fertile imagination.

The fruits of Osage orange look as unappetizing as they are inedible.  The pulp is white, tough and stringy.  The seeds, the most digestible part of the entire mass, are covered with slimy goop.  Cattle sometimes die when they swallow Osage oranges after too little mastication effort.  So why would a tree go to such great lengths to produce such an unappealing fruit?  Perhaps they were designed to attract some now extinct critter that roamed the Oklahoma plains eons ago.  As for the stuffing, stick to bread crumbs.

Monkey oranges make up for their culinary shortfalls in other ways.  New Jersey legend holds that a green fruit in your underwear drawer (or even elsewhere in the house) can repel cockroaches, while in the Midwest Osage oranges were said to retard the advance of crickets, spiders and other pests.  Today, some find these to be valid claims, while others cry pure bunk.  Turning to research for an answer, Iowa State University uncovered yet another odd fact:  chemical compounds in the fruit did indeed thwart German cockroaches, but entire fruits did not.  Would a rotting fruit in your drawers work better?  It’s yet another sticky question for science.

Even more astonishing are the properties of Osage wood.  One of the most naturally rot-resistant types of lumber available, it is superior for fence posts.  Burning it releases more BTUs than almost any other wood.  Students of archery prefer it for bows.  And it has been used to make fine guitars, harps, mandolins and writing pens.

Maggot balls?  Bosch!  We should be proud to call Osage orange a native American.