Ghosts of Evolution
What the Heck ARE These Things?
As I have mentioned before, I moved to Texas from California and purchased a modest house north of Dallas with my travel companion.
When people here in Texas ask me where I am from I smile back at them in my beanie, my multiple mala bead bracelets, and my bicep ink and I tell them very softly, "California." I don't want too many people to hear. Dallas is very weary of California immigrants. They like their Red State with its low taxes and even lower homelessness. Sure, Texas doesn't have the mountains or the Pacific Ocean but it also doesn't have a Coastal Commission or even a Highway Patrol for that mater and they like it that way. Many times on answering the question I'll get a dirty look and a finger in my chest warning me not to change their state. I rarely leave the house wearing a beanie without my Shepard Malinois mix (Chief).
The Russian mafia movers delivered my furniture and surprisingly left all my fingers still connected to my hand. As I set up my office furniture, I heard a large thud in the front of the house. I walked outside and there on the ground dug into the lawn about two inches was a large green round thing the size of a bocce ball but heavier. When I pulled it out of the ground, guessing at what it was, it felt at least 7 pounds or more of solid mass.
I looked up at the tree in front of the house where I and our visitors park our cars. It was an ugly horror-movie-looking tree and had about a hundred of these alien-fruit-nut things still on the branches. Five pounds of almost solid whatever dropped from 20-30 feet would seriously hurt someone or even worse my car!
What idiot would plant a tree like this? Does my homeowners' insurance even cover such a thing? I ran into the house with the green round blob still in my hand and asked my travel companion what it was. She smiled and replied, "Horse Apples."
Now, I lived on a horse ranch growing up and I have shoveled a good many horse apples. This small bowling ball was nothing like what I have seen before and I thought quietly I thank my God for that.
I quit what I was doing and started researching.
The maclura pomifera, or horse apple tree, is called a "ghost of evolution". There are other names for the horse apple that is rarely eaten by animals and never by humans -- monkey ball, yellow-wood, mock orange, and more. A ghost of evolution is a plant that lost its consumer. Animals are needed to help plants propagate. Interestingly, ghosts also include the avocado. The animals that used to eat horse apples vanished thousands of years ago. This is the Pleistocene age nearing its end right before the time of the Mayans and the Aztecs. It is the time of sabertooth cats, beavers that weighted 400 lbs, and giant tree sloths (avocado eaters). During that period the trees -- macular pomifera -- ranged as far north as Canada. Today they are only found in eastern Texas as far north as Arkansas.
Intrigued, I looked into it more. What animal helped propagate these trees?, I pondered. I was delighted to learn that it was the woolly mammoth. This, I suppose, is evidence of Global Warming and the positive impact of the Paris Accord. Its hard to think of a mammoth roaming in front of my new house right where my mailbox still stands considering the asian jungle hot summer temperatures. In the Perot Natural History Museum fairly close by the house they have the full skeleton of a mammoth discovered only miles away. So the evidence -- this green hard and heavy horse apple and sure, the fully intact mammoth skeleton that is about 15 feet tall and tusks almost as long in the museum -- is an irrefutable attestation that these beasts once roamed the earth right here in Northern Dallas.
The macular pomifera tree as we know it was cultivated by the Osage Nation of American Indians. They called it the Bow Tree because the wood made an excellent hunting bow. The wood was so prized that it created the wealth of the Spiroan Mississippian culture. The then local Comanches prized the wood as well and that is probably how the trees became local here near Dallas.
Lewis and Clark sent a sample to President Jefferson during their discovery of passage to the west coast. It was very unique even then before deforestation. Jefferson planted a few on his Virginian estate and sent a few to notables as gifts. During the1800's around here you could trade a horse-apple-tree wood bow for a horse and a blanket.
I went back outside and looked at my new tree with much more respect and love. Just think, I thought, an Indian Bow Tree -- real Pleistocene era mammoth food -- right here in my own front yard.
I went back in and was fixated on more research of this fascinating tree with fruit that could very easily take a grown adult down if hit just right.
It was then that my romance died briefly. The horse apple trees -- so prized by Native Americans and Thomas Jefferson -- were also used by ranchers to keep cattle in their pasture before the invention of barbed wire.
Although my new home was located on what was cattle country 100 years ago -- my maclura pomifera would have been a seedling then -- I went back out to the front yard as if looking at the eyes of a French girl on a European train stop, in a black and white movie, thinking what could have been -- and pondered the dangerous horse apples laying half buried in the lawn.
Nope, I thought to myself, there was a mammoth right here in front of my house!
And I smiled lovingly again. I have a horse apple tree. President Jefferson would be proud.
Dain
"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." -- Shakespeare
I quit what I was doing and started researching.
The maclura pomifera, or horse apple tree, is called a "ghost of evolution". There are other names for the horse apple that is rarely eaten by animals and never by humans -- monkey ball, yellow-wood, mock orange, and more. A ghost of evolution is a plant that lost its consumer. Animals are needed to help plants propagate. Interestingly, ghosts also include the avocado. The animals that used to eat horse apples vanished thousands of years ago. This is the Pleistocene age nearing its end right before the time of the Mayans and the Aztecs. It is the time of sabertooth cats, beavers that weighted 400 lbs, and giant tree sloths (avocado eaters). During that period the trees -- macular pomifera -- ranged as far north as Canada. Today they are only found in eastern Texas as far north as Arkansas.
Intrigued, I looked into it more. What animal helped propagate these trees?, I pondered. I was delighted to learn that it was the woolly mammoth. This, I suppose, is evidence of Global Warming and the positive impact of the Paris Accord. Its hard to think of a mammoth roaming in front of my new house right where my mailbox still stands considering the asian jungle hot summer temperatures. In the Perot Natural History Museum fairly close by the house they have the full skeleton of a mammoth discovered only miles away. So the evidence -- this green hard and heavy horse apple and sure, the fully intact mammoth skeleton that is about 15 feet tall and tusks almost as long in the museum -- is an irrefutable attestation that these beasts once roamed the earth right here in Northern Dallas.
The macular pomifera tree as we know it was cultivated by the Osage Nation of American Indians. They called it the Bow Tree because the wood made an excellent hunting bow. The wood was so prized that it created the wealth of the Spiroan Mississippian culture. The then local Comanches prized the wood as well and that is probably how the trees became local here near Dallas.
Lewis and Clark sent a sample to President Jefferson during their discovery of passage to the west coast. It was very unique even then before deforestation. Jefferson planted a few on his Virginian estate and sent a few to notables as gifts. During the1800's around here you could trade a horse-apple-tree wood bow for a horse and a blanket.
I went back outside and looked at my new tree with much more respect and love. Just think, I thought, an Indian Bow Tree -- real Pleistocene era mammoth food -- right here in my own front yard.
I went back in and was fixated on more research of this fascinating tree with fruit that could very easily take a grown adult down if hit just right.
It was then that my romance died briefly. The horse apple trees -- so prized by Native Americans and Thomas Jefferson -- were also used by ranchers to keep cattle in their pasture before the invention of barbed wire.
Although my new home was located on what was cattle country 100 years ago -- my maclura pomifera would have been a seedling then -- I went back out to the front yard as if looking at the eyes of a French girl on a European train stop, in a black and white movie, thinking what could have been -- and pondered the dangerous horse apples laying half buried in the lawn.
Nope, I thought to myself, there was a mammoth right here in front of my house!
And I smiled lovingly again. I have a horse apple tree. President Jefferson would be proud.
Dain
"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." -- Shakespeare
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