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["R. Keith Etheridge" <grandpa@chipsnet.com>]

In the early forties,when I lived on an Illinois farm , most of the farm fields were still seperated by hedges of osage orange ,so the common name was hedge and supplied almost all the fence posts and turned livestock with their

thorns.Almost all of these were bulldozed out but survive as a weed in the pastures.Learning that it was a suitable rootstock for Chinese che, I made three bark grafts on 3 in diameter rootstock.Two took and one survived the winter.The surviving graft is in its third leaf, had one blossom,and set on fruit which is now the size of a pea and looks like a little haedge ball.Under casual observation , the bloom looked indistinguishable from osage orange or adjacent mullberry.