The Osage-orange

I’ve walked past this tree numerous times over the past few years and never even noticed it - it’s an Osage-orange tree.

The Osage-orange is a fruit that appears to be the offspring between your brain and a tennis ball.

Please indulge me in this PSA…

This is your brain…

This is your brain on drugs…

And this is your brain after it was cut out of your head by chipmunks and then steamrolled by a steamroller being driven by a Maple tree…

Now let this be a lesson - you don’t wanna f*ck around with a Maple tree!

Thank you for following me through that PSA.

In all seriousness, the Osage-orange tree is really a groovy looking tree and there’s only one that I know of in the park.  This one is really old and has a couple of braces to keep it from falling apart from itself…

Just look at all of the time nature spent in putting this architecture together…

And this one tree drops all of this fruit (and more) in a little game of target practice each fall.

Oh the damage that we would have caused if we had access to one of these trees as unsupervised kids in Brooklyn…we would have spent hours each fall hiding between cars and rolling these fruit out to the street for cars to roll over and crush.