Edible Acres shares an easy method for propagating osage orange:
When I first moved to Alabama in August of 2020, I visited some properties up towards the center of the state on a consulting trip with a non-profit that was trying to buy land and start a ministry for veterans. There, we came across some fruiting Osage orange trees and I put some fruits in a bag in the back of one of the guy’s trucks. When we got back, I forgot to grab them – and then completely forgot about them for months, and when I remembered, I assumed he had thrown them out.
The next spring, he got in touch and said, “Oh, you left some fruits or something in my truck… they’re sprouting in the bags,” and then gave me my missing Osage orange fruits, now a blackened mess with growing shoots.
I potted them up, and now they’re more than 4′ tall. One got planted in the yard already.
Yesterday I also got some more bare-root osage trees in the mail which I plan to use as a hedge along the front of our property. They’re almost indestructible, as well as being impenetrable to wildlife (and humans) in tight plantings.
As Eliza Greenman writes in her fascinating article about the creation of Osage orange hedges:
For hundreds of years post colonization (and even today), the goal of many wealthy landowners was/is to have a landscape that mimics the English garden and countryside. One aspect of the English countryside that many people wanted to implement in the 18th and 19th centuries in order to keep livestock in (or out) of their property was that of the thorn-hedge, which was overwhelmingly constructed of English hawthorn in its home country. The problem with using this in the US was that the English hawthorn, an apple cousin, doesn’t like the heat, humidity or fireblight pressure of the Southeastern/Mid-Atlantic climate. When the American hawthorn was tried in its place, people soon found out that when planted densely in a hedge, it would get absolutely hammered by the apple borer. Other thorny plants were tried in its place, such as honeylocust (Jefferson planted juniper with honeylocust and trimmed them to 3 feet tall)- which did not keep pigs out or in, while others trialed trifoliate orange-which never grew tall enough, and the imported buckthorn- which did great in the Northeast (now loathed for how well it did) but underperformed in the South.
It wasn’t until Lewis (of Lewis and Clark) sent osage orange seedlings from the Osage tribe in Missouri to Jefferson (who then gave them to the Landreth Seed Company in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) for this tree to slowly start taking root in the East. 30 years later, a young Andrew Jackson Downing, noticing this tree on the grounds of the Landreth Seed Company, soon became it’s greatest champion.
When you start to dig deep into a landscape’s history, you may find relics of horticultural history hiding in plain sight. I now believe that the old osage orange trees growing in lines throughout pastures, woodlands, and alongside old roads are a remnant of Andrew Jackson Downing’s passion for employing this tree as a hedge and getting loads of influential early adopters on board in order to make this tree more accessible/affordable throughout the nursery trade. It has it all. Robust, thorns, vigor, glossy orange-tree like foliage, few insect problems, long-lived, can take a rough and severe pruning, and grows in lots of different soil types. Who wouldn’t get on board?!
We’ve always loved this tree. There was a nice specimen at the downtown library in (the horrible town of) Smyrna, TN, with a great shape to the trunk. I think it’s since been taken out, as I couldn’t find it last time we visited.
The older trunks can grow in fantastic twisting shapes, and the fruit is simply a bizarre addition to an already gnarly tree.
And if I had $2200 to blow, I would buy this Osage orange wood parlor guitar. I’ve always loved parlor guitars and haven’t owned one in years. To have it made of Osage is even better.
I’m not sure I’ll plant our trees as tight as Eliza recommends in her article, as we’re short on stock, but it is certainly tempting to start a ton more and create permanent hedgerows around our yard and pastures. Perhaps I can use some root cuttings from the bareroot trees we already have, before we put them in the ground. Now there’s a thought…
We’ll have some Osage orange trees for sale in the nursery soon. Though it’s not particularly useful as an edible, it’s one of the best hedge trees ever invented, with the added benefits of being a super rot-resistant wood, a lovely specimen tree, a good for making bows, great for wood-working, and a source of ammo for children to throw at each other.
You’ll find more on Osage Orange at Temperate Climate Permaculture (including the botanical image I nicked for the top of this article).
Also, if you’re interested in plant propagation and want to stop spending so much at plant nurseries, this book will help you immensely.
8 comments
A paper I read came to the conclusion that Osage was one of those plants that had a specific animal dispersal tactic for its seeds, and the animal responsible went extinct at the end of the last ice age. Its range used to be quite wide, but historically it was only found in the Oklahoma area where it was cultivated by the local Indians as a trade item – the other name for it is Bois d’arc, which I am told means bow-wood. The paper suggested that the animal that dispersed it was horses, and claimed that one horse owner said her mules and horses ate the frits and the seedlings came up regularly in her pastures where they grazed, away from her Osage thicket.
It is dead easy to sprout from seed, and tough even as a seedling. I plan to try to plant some out among some native ash trees since we are supposed to be getting the emerald ash borer soon, which will most likely kill all the local ash trees here.
The natural range includes large parts of Oklahoma, Texas (from north down into central TX), Arkansas, and Louisiana. I’m sure there were also small isolated populations outside that range. I read it was the mammoths that were the main dispersal animal. Squirrels also love them. For cows and horses the fruits can be a choking hazard, my father lost a bull that way.
I buried a fruit in the ground and up grew tons of little sprouts. Pro tip – don’t wait five years to transplant them. They do have a prodigious amount of thorns which isn’t fun to handle, and they died after transplanting (though we did have a terrible drought last summer).
Where is scrub fest going to take place?
This is the upcoming spring Scrubfest-esque event: https://thesurvivalgardener.com/spring-good-gardening-superclass-february-17-2024/
We will have Scrubfest III in Fall. October 19th.
Supposedly Osage is the rootstock for the grafting of che aka mandarin melon berry trees. That would be a cool use of some of your trees.
Death hedge!
Yes!