Alana Hatley

If you’ve spent any time in the rural areas of the US, you likely know Maclura pomifera, though you may not know that you know it. It is an evolutionary anachronism, a species whose ecological partners have largely died out, leaving it to make fruit that entices no one. It has no predators and no pollinators, which has rendered it largely absent within the native plant movement. It has a tiny native range but an enormous naturalized one, covering most of the contiguous US—it has been described as weedy and opportunistic, moving in easily to disturbed or abused land. It was once valued by white colonists as a living hedge, but barbed wire and steel supplanted it. It is still valued by Native American bow makers of many different tribes, though there are not many such bow makers in practice today. It burns hot, resists disease, refuses to rot, and may be the hardest wood in North America. For all these reasons, Maclura seems like an ideal candidate for widespread cultivation. Yet aside from its (now defunct) use as a living hedge, it does not seem to have been deliberately planted in large numbers by Native peoples or by colonists. This essay asks: why not? Tracing the rhetorical life of Maclura pomifera raises questions about the relationships between written and oral histories, evolution and cultivation, empiricism and generational wisdom, commodification and care. To tell the story of this tree, this project constructs an intersection of science studies, historiography, bow-making, gardening lore and memoir, ecological rhetoric, and conservation.