The Osage orange, Texas’s ugliest fruit (2021)
texasmonthly.com
texasmonthly.com
One such way was "Hedging the Town".
You get a couple of buddies, ride out to a hedge row in one of their pickups, fill the bed of the pickup to the rails with hedge apples.
You then drive to the rival nearby's town main intersection (in the midwest, there's only usually one major intersection that has a stoplight or 4 way stop) and back up into the middle of it around 1am in the morning.
You then drop the tailgate and floor the gas, spreading hedgeapples in a randomized layout in the intersection. By doing this, you are assisting with biodiversity in the rival town. Unfortunately local residents were not commonly pleased with said efforts to help plant diversity.
SMU is in Dallas, Texas.
I’m not sure that’s common outside of that awesome, righteous incident?
right up there with OSU Cowboys building a new stadium and the brick work was contracted out to someone that was an OU fan. legend has it that the brick was laid in such a manner that the variances of brick patterns could be seen the OU logo in the OSU stadium. urban legend or not, it's what passes as great rivalry stories
Texas Monthly: "Lipscomb said that the unusually large fruit is a remnant of prehistoric times, once eaten by massive, now-extinct animals like the woolly mammoth"
Wikipedia: "Controversial suggestions have been made that it was consumed by extinct Pleistocene megafauna, but these claims have been criticised as lacking empirical evidence."
It seems likely that something must have eaten them at some point to spread the species around. Those things weigh about 2 pounds and wouldn't move far without help from an animal - or maybe a tornado. I would love to find out that there's a species on this planet whose reproductive strategy depended on tornadoes.
The seed seems rather large, and the fruit is uselessly huge by comparison, it doesn’t seem much like the sort of things which would be adapted to being spread by squirrels.
BTW - we always called them “hedge apples”
Also, I'm certain that something ate them. I've personally seen Squirrels, groundhogs, horses, and cows eat them.
The wild cucumber is shaped like a hand grenade, and splatters a glue-like substance on the target.
Someone in another comment speculated on whether it's possible for some fruit to evolve to propagate its seeds across the landscape by tornado. I suppose it might also be possible for a plant to evolve to present passers-by an irresistible temptation to throw it at someone.
I live in Oregon now though and my kids love throwing horsetail shoots at each other like spears, which I imagine does a great job distributing its unique spores.
whoa there buddy! thems fightin words. round here, in polite society, we refer to these as tall tales. they're part of the bigger in texas lore. calling them controversial is darn right rude that only a city slicker northerner would dare utter in the great state! that being said, i say bless your heart!
Not exactly the same thing:
Birds, insects hitch a ride in hurricanes
https://wildlife.org/birds-insects-hitch-a-ride-in-hurricane...
Hurricanes May Bring Unusual Pests
https://specialtycropindustry.com/hurricanes-may-bring-unusu...
I have read that it is believed that flies and other insects found on remote islands originate with one or a few being blown in on a hurricane.
As an young adult I took an opportunity to quit my perfectly good job and ride off into the wind on a horseback trip with a cousin that would've placed us in Wyoming as an initial stop and ultimately would've taken us to northern British Columbia had everything worked the way we "planned". I am using the most ill-fitting, inaccurate usage of planning here as our only real preparation involved acclimating our mounts and our posteriors to the saddle and acquiring far too few items necessary to sustain such a journey at the time. Neither of us even carried a map. We just figured that with the limited funds available and a strong enough desire to taste the breeze we could figure it out on the way.
I will never forget one of our first nights on the "trail" out along the highway across central Texas when we passed through a town with one of those famously stylish courthouse squares. We were clearly a curiosity and a number of people watched as we plodded along thru town trying to keep our less dedicated steeds pointed down the right sidewalks. On the square, there was an old legacy business where a cobbler or saddle-maker had a shop and out front above the awning to advertise was a large sign and a kid-sized statuesque version of a paint horse hanging over the sidewalk to draw the eye to the small shop.
As we passed under that paint horse statue my own mount let fly a large volume of suitably digested plant matter from the previous morning's grazing of the Johnson grass growing along the highway where we pitched our bedrolls.
It was quite fitting and a perfect spot for a pile of horse shit and we all had a great chuckle.
Continuing out of town along one of the small farm-to-market roads where we hoped to find a spot to camp later we found ourselves passing the second-from-last house out by the city limits sign. There were people in the yard including several kids who were enthralled by our horses. A couple of the parents approached us and asked whether we could let their kids have a quick ride before we passed on out of town. Since our "schedules" were largely free of any planned events for that afternoon or any of the other upcoming afternoons we gladly agreed and were met with gleeful shouts as they jockeyed amongst themselves for the rights to plant the first butt in a saddle.
1980 was a hot year in Texas and this day was just another in a record-setting string of days with high temperatures above 100F (37.8C). We surrendered our sweaty mounts to the exuberance of youth and the control of their parents and as we visited with the other parents waiting for their own child's turn we found ourselves invited to have supper and spend the night with their family. This was at the time a fantastic development for us since our supplies had been diminished a bit over the preceding days and the thought of a supper and a bedroll inside a house on the floor was quite appealing. The price on our end was quite agreeable too - allow the kids to ride our horses and they would take care of removing the saddles, brushing the horses down and grazing them in the backyard vegetation overnight. This was indeed luck of the purest kind and a clear sign from the universe that all would somehow work out in the end for us.
There were two related families living in this large two-story Victorian house that obviously needed a bit of love on the outside but was brim-full on the inside once they all were in their proper places for the evening. One of the husbands approached me and took me off to the side and this is the part where the bois d'arc comes into play in this long post that most will never read.
He told me that his wife had noticed that I was afflicted by a large protruding wart on my left elbow and that if I was agreeable that she would like to help me eliminate that wart but she was too shy to approach me about it. Well, I'm a bit of a shy person myself but she had made a proposition that I had to admit was quite attractive so we wandered over to where she was standing, under a huge bois d'arc tree that shaded a large part of their back yard.
After apologizing, she told me that she was Cherokee, originally from Oklahoma and that she had noticed my wart and wanted to help us since we had added so much joy to their kid's afternoons. She told me that they had a treatment for warts that would allow me to be rid of it in a few weeks if I could keep it going after we pulled out of town the next day. Well, I've always been open to learning anything that I didn't know yesterday so she asked to borrow my hunting knife that I carried sheathed on my hip. I have to admit that the prospect of backyard surgery with a hunting knife that might not be that sanitary was a bit concerning but I handed over the knife and she took it and started explaining what she would do and how I would need to continue in the next couple weeks.
I watched as she made a cut on a young bois d'arc limb through the bark along the growth direction and waited as the white sap began to flow. Using the edge of the knife she collected a large enough amount of sap to completely surround that large protrusion and coat it thoroughly. She said that I needed to let the sap dry in place and that if it all washed off in the rain to reapply as soon as possible so that it all stayed covered. She told me the sap was beneficial and if I could keep it covered for two weeks that within 6 weeks the wart would fall off and leave normal skin in its place.
As fate would have it and as luck sometimes goes there was no rain over the next few weeks to wash that sap from my elbow and all the sweat that I managed to produce couldn't erase the translucent black circle of dried sap from my elbow. Days after leaving these generous folks behind us, we had managed to find temporary work in a small town miles down the highway from this house on a local "ranch" working the absentee owner's cattle and in return we had use of a pole barn shed for nightly shelter and all the beans and cornbread we could eat at no charge. There was no shower or other facilities so normal hygiene for us would hold no great attraction for most people today. We developed a funk that could probably be classified as a gaseous bioweapon if it didn't burn up the tools used to analyze its noxious properties first.
After several weeks out on the ranch working every day in the heat we found ourselves invited guests of the ranch owner who would be visiting and hosting a party where we could mix and mingle with lots of people including several of the current crop of Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. There would be good food with or without beans and plenty of it and best of all, free beer.
We decided that we had to confront the lingering clouds of man-funk and find a way to clean our dusty clothes and cowboy hats or we would need to decline this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Inquiring with the owner about how we could handle this dilemma we finally discovered something that we would've known in advance had we bothered to make any solid plans. We were less than a mile from the cool, clear waters of the mighty Brazos River. Armed with that knowledge, a sudden enthusiasm for cleanliness and a couple bars of Ivory soap that had seemed a bit of overkill due to the lack of water, we saddled our trusty mounts and rode over to that part of the ranch that butted up to the river.
Like a couple of school-boys playing hooky from class we shucked our duds, grabbed the soap and stepped off into the shallow clear waters, almost deep enough to reach the dangles and we began to splash that cold water all over and hoot and whoop loudly. This was more clean water than we had seen in one place since we last saw a lake weeks ago. As we stood there in the water in the sun and tried to power that soap through the accumulated crud the bar of soap found my left elbow. Now normally any hard contact on that wart would bring a sharp pain. That Ivory soap glided across that elbow with no hint of a bump or no pain from contact and I so bent everything around to inspect. The wart had fallen off all by itself and there was no indication other than a remnant halo of dirty, dried bois d'arc sap to suggest that anything had ever been there but regular skin. It had by that time been about 6 weeks since the lady had smeared that glob of sap on that elbow and I had not added nor subtracted anything in the meantime. There had been a dark circle of sap which held a bit of daily grit but otherwise was unchanged. With one treatment and a seemingly appropriate level of sunshine and neglect, that wart had fallen off and though it has been more than four decades it has not returned.
That is my true story. If you lasted this long you might've enjoyed being on that ride. Happy trails!
I’m not surprised that the sap might have cured your wart. The sap contains latex and other irritating components. Several cures for warps involve covering them with an irritant and triggering the body to slough off a layer of skin containing the wart. Compound-W is salicylic acid in a waterproof carrier that irritates the skin into peeling off. Some people have used duct tape placed over the wart for that.
When I was a kid I had a grove of these in the front yard. I had heard them referred to all of the names mentioned, but never did I see them spelled until much much later in life. To have seen "bois d'arc" spelled out would have been surprising let alone to know it was french in origin.
As a teenager, it was part of my yard work chores to keep the horse-apples cleared from the ground. Being from texas and out in the boonies, "yard" is doing some heavy lifting. The yard was several acres. We had the bois d'arc trees along with texas pecans--the small thick shelled tougher than an aramdillo to crack open kind. So along with the horse-apples, I had to gather all of the fallen limbs. These went into a pile, and when the pile got big enough, we had a bonfire.
>1980 was a hot year in Texas and this day was just another in a record-setting string of days with high temperatures above 100F (37.8C).
This might be the same summer I remember as being old enough to be aware of how hot hot can be in a Texas summer. Maybe it was the record-setting nature that intrigued me, but it definitely sticks out from that time. I would gladly have a summer of a mere 30 consecutive days of triple digits seeing how now we are approaching 90+ days.
>we passed through a town with one of those famously stylish courthouse squares.
So so many towns with the old downtown areas of the courthouse in the center of the square with the shops around it. That number goes down quickly filtering by stylish courthouses. Would this happen to have been Waxahachie, or further north near McKinney? As an adult with much different interests than when I was a kid, I am now attracted to this part of Texas history and how modern day is trying to recapture some of that.
We also scrounged native hard-sells pecans from wherever we could find them. Old trees in city parks were a great source. Nowadays I have several large easy crackers out here and for the first few years that I lived here I wasted time every season conjuring ways to end up with more ripe pecans than the local birds could abscond with. It was definitely a losing proposition on my end as the crows descended before the nuts were ripe and hauled them as they ripened so that I was largely left with the ones they didn't want to mess with. It became such a joke that I finally gave in and today I sit on the porch and wave as the family of crows that live around my place cycle through stealing my nuts. I am currently trying to lure them close enough to the house to become their friends. Wish me luck.
Yes. 1980 was a doozie. Very memorable when, like me, you spent all day from just before dawn to slightly after dark working outside just waiting for beer thirty when the boss would roll up with some hang-down, cheese, saltines, and an onion with a carton of milk for everyone. That was the 5:30 (beer thirty) supper break for us.
This was the old Hill County Courthouse that burned down in 1993. Willie Nelson did a benefit concert since he was born and raised there in Abbott in Hill County. His annual picnics were the best outdoor events that I ever attended.
That 80s summer was a bit early for me to be getting off of work, unless I get credit as having a job from being outside all day playing in the woods, creek, and fields doing whatever a young lad in the 80s could get away with since as you've said there was no internet, console gaming, tablet/devices, or anything else other than UHF TV (gag me) and 3 networks (that signed off to the national anthem each night at midnight) to really do. The area I grew up in is steep with history of cowboy vs native american lore. There was a small fort nearby. The creek in the back had ruts hardened into the limestone that I was told were made by wagon wheels. This seemed logical to me as my friends and I found several buried wagon wheels, arrow heads, and lots of fossils in the creek.
Edit: nearly forgot to mention the pecans at my grandparents house. they had the lovely giant soft shelled variety. every year, all of the grand kids would get to play the "who can get the most pecans from the yard" game. these would then become the spoils that we'd use for the next year. as the trees got older, they would produce so many nuts that their limbs would bend to the point of breaking. (for those that don't know, you can shout at a pecan tree and the stress from the sound waves will dislodge at least a couple of limbs.) as we got older, we realized we could just shake the limbs and have fresh pecans that the squirrels hadn't had first crack at yet. after the raining of nuts stopped, those low bowing limbs would let out an audible sigh as the weight they had been carrying was suddenly released.
Lake Whitney just below the dam was the ranch we were on. The owner was one of those quick-draw McGraw guys who entered six-gun fast draw competitions and was a winner. He might've been a doctor in real life. It's been a while and we only met him in person a couple of times.
I definitely remember the 3 channels with Elvis singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic at sign-off and then the poem High Flight before it all went to snow. That line where he slips the surly bonds of earth and touches the face of God was a great turn of phrase for a sign-off.
I grew up around the old Fort where Cynthia Ann Parker and her family had their Comanche problems that led to the birth of Quanah Parker in a roundabout kind of way. We worked on the land where the Comanche had camped for generations and where they camped before they hit the fort. The sands were full of arrowheads around there and a drive thru a pasture could yield several after a good rain when the gophers would do their home improvements and shove those points up through the dirt to the surface.
Pecans are self-pruning according to an arborist I talked with. They retain as many limbs as they need and in a drought will drop limbs. That is what I use in my smoker. I pick up limbs that the tree drops during the year and keep them around for flavoring briskets or other smoked meats and vegetables.
Man as big as Texas is, it seems to be a small world. That's where my mother's family is from too. How many times I've had to correct people on the pronunciation of Mexia. Downtown Groesbeck is somewhere I have spent a bit of time. My mom's dad is related to the Parkers (which by extension means I am as well), but I've never traced it back to confirm.
I used to know all those dirt roads and oilfield lease roads. I learned to drive out there around Shiloh power-sliding around those blind curves at night so you could see whether there was any oncoming traffic.
Some of my family also had deep connections to Hill and Limestone County.
Groesbeck had a great diner near the courthouse where we used to get breakfast every morning on our way out to the Kosse/Marquez area.
Sometimes my brother would make beautiful things out of bois d'arc wood. If you have the patience and the carbide-tipped tools to work it it's gorgeous wood that lasts forever because it's hard as a rock.
The summer of 1980 was indeed unbearably hot. Texas summers are always hot but the summer of 1980 was something else entirely. I remember not feeling cool for the entire month of July, even at midnight.
We did seismic work all over that area for months. One rancher invited the whole crew to a calf fry so we shut down and enjoyed mountain oysters and cold beer. That area is full of good people.
Gainesville was quite prosperous in those days. But it was a dry town [then], so you couldn't have had a beer party without attracting some attention. That's probably why you went 30 miles away to Sherman :-)
I did a stint at a well logging company in college. The big French one that starts with 'S.' Or rather two such companies if you count TI. They're a semiconductor powerhouse now but they started out in the seismic business.
Scumbagger. I know the one.
EDIT: I don't know when you were there but I was MWD for Analdril. Biggest collection of liars, maggots, self-interested pricks, and thieves in the industry. If you worked there you would understand and have a personal perspective on why the O&G industry's poor public reputation is something that they have obviously earned and cultivated.
And, in southwestern American speech, "bowdock", I believe.
There are a couple of osage orange trees near where I live in Washington, DC.
When cut open, they release a natural insect repellent. Works against many species of ants and cockroaches among other insects.
The wood is excellent material for fences. Very tough and durable.
Apparently, "bowdock" and other similar names are a corruption of "bois d'arc".
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/local/kyle-muns...
That's better than kale farmers calling their crop a superfood.
Seems like it would be an interesting wood to work with. I don't think I've ever seen it for sale at a hardwood store, though maybe I would if I lived in its native geography.
I’ve worked small pieces with hand tools, and found it dense, but enjoyable.
We had 4x4s in the shop but would still replace them with Osage orange limbs. Logic was even though it was more work to find a new limb, it was less work in that long run.
Makes absolutely excellent seasoned cord word as well.
Beautiful tree, though.