What tree fruit in Tennessee is about the size of a grapefruit, green, aromatic, and extremely bumpy? My aunt brought some up to Wisconsin years ago after a family visit. The fruits are used for keeping varmits out of the drawer and closets according to her. It’s very hard also.
Osage Orange
Heh. My first simul-answer!
Aren’t those fruit pretty universally called “horse apples”? In my experience in Texas, they are. The trees that produce them, at least around here, are called Bois d’Arc, pronounced BO-dark. The name comes from French, and indicates how the wood is especially good for making bows. The trees are indigenous to Texas and are very common here.
Osage Orange is the name. Thanks people.
They don’t grow up here and Horse Apples around here are what people refer to when they point out crab apples in a pasture or wormy tree falls. The crab apples that people canned, not the decorative yard tree.
I’m reminded why I don’t walk in black walnut woods in the fall. I found if you want to walk a trail on a breezy fall day, you should avoid an oak woods also, unless you wear a thick stocking cap.
I’m not sure how many places this is true in, but horse apple is a euphimisim for equine feces that I heard growing up. 
They are used by Kansas farmer for windbreaks. They’re inedible, and if you get the sap from them on your clothes it’s difficult to impossible to get out again. They are known as hedge apples here.
Strike that, I was thinking of ground apples. My apologies. :o
I’ve always just called them tennis balls.
I don’t know about bows and arrows, but the Hedge Apple Tree makes into dandy rot resistant fence posts and the live plant makes good pig tight and cow high field hedges.
It’s not mentioned in the articles I’ve read, but they are also used as windbreaks to prevent soil erosion due to their thorniness.
The Bois d’arc and the Osage orange tree are the same thing. The fruits are often called horse apples because horses are fond of eating them.
As a kid in Texas, I remember them being called Horse Apples too; never once heard them referred to as Osage Oranges. Not saying that’s not what they are; only that regionally they are very definitely referred to as Horse Apples.
My dad makes Stone Age style arrows and bows and he says that the best wood for bows comes from the osage orange tree.
Yes, they do grow in Wisconsin. At least in the southern region. I’ve seen 'em.
Of course, they may have been planted by farmers rather than wandering in on their own.
Originally native to Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma, the tree is now found in most states; perhaps due to the efforts of an unsung American hero, Johnny Horseappleseed.
The pecan also grows up here, but there’s only a small number. I 'm sure I’ll never see them. In the 70’s Organic Gardening collected pecans from a few hardy northern trees and they were planted to hopefully grow northern hardy trees. People were sold the pecans for planting trees in northern climates. We have hickory all over, and in the transitional zones you get hicans which is a cross. I have known the locations of two butternut trees , but have no idea if either exist anymore.
Sometime in the early 80’s a groove of American Chestnuts were found by La Crosse Wisconsin in the bluff heights. The 90 acre grove had survived by it’s isolation. The nuts where supposed to be used to reestablish the decimated species. I see that the trees are now infected since people started going there.
I always heard it as “road apples”. Road apples and cow pies.
As a kid growing up in Pennsylvania, we called them “monkey balls”.