Osage orange

Description:

Spotted during a brief side-trip in the very small rural community of Artesia, in northeast Mississippi. They were everywhere I looked. The tree, also called hedge apple, is used as a windbreak ... so maybe they were planted for that purpose and that explains their concentration.

Notes:

Surprising collection of details from Wikipedia: 1) The fruit is edible, I read, but nothing much eats it ... human or animal. This is unusual, as most large fleshy fruit serves the function of seed dispersal by means of its consumption by large animals. One recent hypothesis is that the Osage orange fruit was eaten by a giant ground sloth that became extinct shortly after the first human settlement of North America. Other extinct Pleistocene megafauna, such as the mammoth, mastodon and gomphothere, may have fed on the fruit and aided in seed dispersal. An equine species that went extinct at the same time also has been suggested as the plant's original dispersal agent because modern horses and other livestock will sometimes eat the fruit. 2) The fruit was once used to repel spiders by placing one under the bed. Various studies have found elemol, an extract of Osage orange, to repel several species of mosquitos, cockroaches, crickets, and ticks. 3) The trees acquired the name bois d'arc, or "bow-wood", from early French settlers who observed the wood being used for war clubs and bow-making by Native Americans. Meriwether Lewis was told that the people of the Osage Nation "esteem the wood of this tree for the making of their bows, that they travel many hundred miles in quest of it." Many modern bowyers assert the wood of the Osage orange is superior even to English Yew for this purpose ... 4) The heavy, close-grained yellow-orange wood is very dense and is prized for tool handles, treenails, fence posts, and other applications requiring a strong dimensionally stable wood that withstands rot. When dried, the wood has the highest BTU content of any commonly available North American wood, and burns long and hot.