Thorny woodland plant ID

[Riles]

Here's a new one for me. Rather than take the time to key it out, I thought I'd be lazy and let you guys chew over it for a while.

Found it streamside, almost entirely on it's own (one other specimen that I could find), small shrub, just a few leaves on it. Looks to be a rose of some sort, clearly not multiflora rose. Leaves attach below each thorn and are winged.

[Texas Ranger]

Mock orange, humph, beat Danny to the punch.

[Texas Ranger]

or trifoliate orange, for the technical.

[SwampDonkey]

I don 't think mock orange is thorny though. Folks grow it here and it comes off a clump that grows about 20 feet high.

I go with trifoliate orange Poncirus trifoliata a non native shrub used as hedges in the south. It's described in Peterson's, but no illustration.

[Texas Ranger]

Both names are used in the south.

[Riles]

Poncirus trifoliata it is. I like VaTech's description of the form:

Form: A small tree or bush with numerous vicious thorns and green stems

I'm surprised to see that it's nonnative. This thing is way out in the middle of nowhere all by itself.

[WDH]

I have ran across big clumps of it in Texas Ranger's stomping ground in East Texas.  I found it in the bottomlands.

[woodtroll]

I have seen it at the high water mark of the Ohio River flood plain in Southern Illinois. Closest house was over a mile away.

[Dodgy Loner]

I was at a vineyard in my county a couple weeks ago (I work with a lot of wine producers in my county), and the owner's wife was showing me all of the work she had done in her garden.  She showed me a trifoliate orange, and asked if I knew what it was.  I told her yes, and that they were terribly invasive in some counties in Georgia.  She replied that she had tremendous difficulty locating a specimen, and that she had paid a nursery in Atlanta $200 for hers :.  I know many landowners in Greene County who would let her dig up all she could haul out for free :D.

[WDH]

$200 ??? .

[DanG]

Isn't that used as root stock for grafting fruit trees?  We know it as sour orange around here.  I have one that used to be a satsuma tree, but it was killed back by a bad freeze and the root stock sprouted.  My Dad has some pear trees that he planted too shallow, and I keep having to cut that stuff off where it sprouts from the base of the trees.  Wicked, wicked thorns!!

[SwampDonkey]

No worst than $100 for a red maple that grows wild on about any lot in New Brunswick. They put big names on them, all the sudden they become a gold mine. :D I see people digging up wild cedars along the highway to take to their nursery to sell. Not hard to figure out when the nursery name is painted on the side.  All the sudden a northern white cedar becomes a pyramid cedar, they include the latin name on the tag, but the average gardener wouldn't know it for anything more than something special.  :D :D

[WDH]

That is about as wicked as thorns get  .

There was a show on the History Channel about Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett.  It was said that Davy was so tough that he could slide down the trunk of a honeylocust tree with nary a scratch.  Now that is tough ;D.

[Texas Ranger]

That explains why they walked funny.