Osage Orange?

[Geoff Whaling]

OO for sure. Was once planted all over the prairie for living fences. Once only found along the Red river in Tex. and Oakl. There was a thriving business selling and shipping wagon loads of seed to desperate cow people and hence the now large range. They required pruning to keep the thorns low to the ground. Then came along this horrible stuff called barbed wire. Such is technology. It is what Foresters call a "lost tropical" along with Mullberry, Catalps, Black and Honey locust and others. Evolved in the tropics and were able to thrive in our colder midlatitude climates. There are others that have been introduced but these were here on their own. PS-- ring width is a product of abundant sunlight and can change in the same tree. Like most tropicals it has large showy flowers/fruit, large leaves and often very hard and durable wood. Many have specific gravities of 0.8 to 1.5. Walnut is about 0.6+-. Old Forester

Looks like OO to me as we get it here in Australia as well.

Interesting this came up as I was researching OO in Australia a little while back. This is a quote from a heritage listing of an OO fence in NSW at Peats Crater

"Hedges were the dominant form of fence used in Great Britain in the 18th and 19^th centuries, and although a few were planted in Australia, they were never common except in northern Tasmania. Osage Orange was the favoured hedge plant in the prairie states of the United States before the invention of barbed wire in 1874. Some colonial Australian nurserymen and others praised the plant for fences, but by the 1860s the de facto standard fence in Australia was post-and-wire.

The hedge in Peats Crater is a highly significant historic heritage item , satisfying multiple heritage criteria at such a level as to be considered of State significance. Hedges were a technological dead-end in the Australian colonies. They were never common in rural NSW, and any that survive, either as boundary markers or as fences, are rare today. This example demonstrates one approach to marking boundaries. (Criterion a). The hedge combines British fencing technology (hedges) of the 18th and 19th centuries with the most widely used hedge plant in the USA in the 19th century before the invention of barbed wire in 1874."

[Geoff Whaling]

A handy test for you

"One helpful characteristic that can help separate it from lookalikes such as Mulberry or Black Locust (besides being heavier) is that Osage Orange contains a water-soluble yellow dye, so putting shavings into water will turn the water yellow."

http://www.wood-database.com/lumber-.../osage-orange/

[Malcolm McLeod]

Even easier ID is from the fruit - - bright green, large (size of a large naval orange or small grapefruit), with surface texture much like an orange, 'tho not a true skin. Hold on to a few. Toss in a closet. Bugs hate them (per my grandparents).

Squirrels will leave a 3 lb pile of shavings trying to gnaw their way to the kernel (hopefully, not the ones you put in the closet!).

My aunt's N. central Texas house is 75-80 years old and still sits on Bois D'Arc (OO) blocks. Which sit on the bare ground.

[Mel Fulks]

But there are male and female plants with OO. So a male plant might be denied his identity by the fruit standard.

[Alan Arnup]

A subdivision of land a few miles from me required 27 Osage Orange trees to be cut down and subsequently mulched. The landowner lost my number after promising to keep me some. A few months later he found it and said he had kept me a little of it. I still have quite a few blocks of the original trailer load - it is as hard as concrete to turn but gives a magnificent result. See attached pic. of a completed lidded bowl I made.

Alan