November 21, 2010 - Hedge Apples
Welcome to the Nature Notebook.

Here and there Osage orange trees survive from days long past. Native to the Midwest and southeast, settlers transported these trees to Pennsylvania. Planted in hedgerows Osage orange served as natural barbed wire long before the metal version. These thorny, shrubby trees have all but disappeared from our landscape. Related to mulberries rather than oranges, Osage orange fruit litters the ground in late fall. Called “horse apples” or “hedge apples,” the multi-seeded fruit looks like some alien pod. Osage orange seeds once depended on ancestors of wild horses and ground sloths to eat their fruit and disperse the seeds. Today, animals ignore the fruit, although squirrels eat the seeds. Osage wood was prized for bow-making by the Osage Indians of the Midwest because of its strength and pliability. Modern bow-makers still use it for making traditional bows.

This is PPL's naturalist, Jon Beam, with the Nature Notebook for WVIA.