NON EDIBLE FRUITS
Non-edible fruits
are very fleshy five-valved red capsules.
The fruits and leaves are poisonous,
containing andromedotoxin which helps
lowers blood pressure and causes breathing
problems, dizziness, cramps, vomiting
and diarrhea. Bog Laurel occurs with
and strongly resembles Labrador Tea
at the Ozette Prairies.
 Osage-Orange
The Osage-orange (Maclura pomifera)
is a curious plant in mulberry family
called Moraceae. It is also known
as hedge-apple, horse-apple and the
bow wood.
The species is extremely
dioeciously, with male and female
flowers on the different plants. It
is a small deciduous tree, typically
growing to the 8-15 m tall. This fruit,
syncope of achene, is roughly spherical,
but very bumpy, and 7-15 cm in the
diameter and it is filled with a sticky
white sap. Fall color is a bright
yellow-green with a lovely faint orange
odor.
The plant is native
to an area in the central United States
consisting of southwestern Arkansas,
southeastern Oklahoma, but a narrow
belt in eastern Texas, and in extreme
northwest corner of Louisiana, but
was not common anywhere else. It was
a curiosity when Meriwether Lewis
sent some slips and cuttings to President
Jefferson in March 1804. The samples,
donated by "Mr. Peter Choteau,
who resided number of the greater
portion of his time for many years
with the Osage Nation" according
to Lewis' letter, didn't take, but
later the actual thorny Osage-orange
was widely naturalized throughout
the U.S country. The sharp-thrones
trees were planted as cattle-deterring
hedges before the introduction of
barbed wire, and the wood was also
used to make fence posts that preserved
well in the ground.
The trees picked
up the name bois d’Arcy, or
"bow-wood", because early
the French settlers observed the wood
being used for the bow-making by Native
Americans. The people of the Osage
Nation "esteem the wood of this
tree for good making of their bows,
that they travel many hundred miles
in quest of it," Meriwether Lewis
was told in 1804. The heavy and closely
grained yellow-orange wood is also
the prized for tool handles.
The heavy, fleshy
fruit are very torn apart
by the squirrels to get at the seeds,
but few other native animals make
use of it food source. This is unusual,
as the largest fleshy fruits serve
the function of seed dispersal, accomplished
by their consumption by a large animal.
One recent hypothesis is that the
Osage-orange fruit was eaten by the
giant sloth that became extinct shortly
after the first human settlement of
North America. An equine species that
actually went extinct at the same
time also has been suggested as the
plant's original dispersal mechanism
because modern horses and other livestock
will eat the fruit. Humans do not
eat this fruit because of its bitter
taste; it has also been used as a
spider deterrent. Where not eaten
by horses, they are mostly left to
rot where they fall if not found by
squirrels.
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