Biltmore Bodark

Our farm has a ways to go before it can compare with the world famous Biltmore Estate. But we both have an Osage Orange.

It was probably fifteen years ago that I was visiting the Estate with a friend and, while wandering through the extensive gardens, picked up a strange orange fruit from beneath a thorny shrub-like tree. Or tree-like shrub. The sign said Osage Orange and, as there were plenty of these fruits rotting on the ground and Mr. Vanderbilt was nowhere in sight, I put the sweet-smelling thing into my pocket.

Some days later, I remembered it and laid it on the bench in the greenhouse to let it ripen. When it became rather mushy, I extracted some seeds, put them in a pot of dirt and pretty much ignored it. The pot got watered when everything else did but for half a year or longer, nothing happened.

When finally a green shoot emerged, I was thrilled. A free plant! From the Biltmore Estate yet!

The Osage Orange lived in a series of ever larger pots for about five years till it became obvious it needed room to expand. When I planted it among other shrubs and trees down near our pond, it was maybe a yard high.

Now it towers above me -- twenty feet tall and almost as wide. Its wicked thorns prevent us from doing much pruning. But I like it. This spring it was covered with sweet-smelling white blossoms and now! now it's awash in golden fruit.

Somewhere between the size of a tennis ball and a golf ball, the fruits feel velvety and are oddly fragrant. They're not edible, except for the seeds, according to one source, but they may repel fleas.

The plant has a fascinating history, including the fact that its wood was used by the Osage Indians for bows -- hence the name given it by French explorers -- bois d'arc -- bow wood. Or bodark as it's known where it grows wild.

My particular plant has its own claim to fame -- my daughter-in-law Aileen, who is an art director at White Wolf Games Studio, used a picture of its thorny branches as the background for the cover of the award-winning Changeling: The Lost. Immortality!