By Mike Isbell
University of Georgia

The telephone caller said, “Mike, I have a student in my class
that brought some kind of fruit to school. I’ve never seen
anything like it before in my life. And no one knows what it is.
Can you help me identify it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Describe it to me.”

“Well, it’s about the size of a softball and kind of a
yellow-green color,” she said. “And it’s really hard and kind of
rough looking.”

“Does it look like a monkey’s brain?” I asked.

“I’ve never seen a monkey’s brain,” she answered. “But yes, it
looks just like a brain.”

‘I know what it is’

“Then I know what it is — it’s an Osage orange,” I said.

It never fails. Every year in the fall, someone will see these
things for the first time and bring them to me to identify.

The fruit comes from a medium-sized tree with a short, often
crooked trunk and spreading branches. It grows really fast, but
only to a height of 20 to 40 feet. The leaves are bright and
medium to dark green. They turn yellow in the fall, sometimes a
fantastic yellow.

The blooms are nothing to rave about. They’re just small, green
flowers.

Useful wood

The wood is kind of neat, though. It’s very rot-resistant and has
been used for hedgerows and fence posts. Native Americans once
used it to make bows for their arrows, which is where the tree
gets another name: “bodark,” or “bodock,” from the French phrase,
“bois d’arc,” meaning “bow wood.”

That brain-looking fruit — now that’s worth seeing. But it may
not be good for much of anything.

It is eaten by livestock, which has given rise to yet another
common name, “hedge apple.” And I suppose it would make good
ammunition if you had to have something to throw.

But it’s probably not a tree you’ll want to plant in your yard.
If you were to be sitting under its shade in October,
contemplating about all the bows you could make, and one of those
fruits fell on your head — well, it could be downright
lethal.