There’s a tree found in the eastern half (if not more) of the Mid-Atlantic area that grows huge ball-like fruit. People say the fruit is an “osage orange”. It’s green and bumpy. It’s about the size of a grapefruit, and the skin is like a cross between a basketball’s surface and a cantelope rind! Very weird.
What do you know about these things? Is that the correct name? What tree is it from, and osage tree, I WAG? What’s inside? Is it edible? - Jinx
Oh, I should have mentioned that the skin is a bright green. I doubt it ripens to an orange color. I’d WAG calling it an orange is a misnomer…like eggplant! 
http://www.osageorange.com/
The wood is actually orange, or at least yellow. It’s good for turning, fenceposts and apparently making bows.
Google is your friend: http://www.gpnc.org/osage.htm, http://www.dnr.state.oh.us/forestry/Education/ohiotrees/osageorange.htm, and also http://weather.nmsu.edu/AbqPlantList/large/OsageOrange.htm are good starts from page 1 of a search for [“osage orange”].
Here’s information about the Osage Orange (Maclura pomifera). That is its correct common name, although name “orange” is something of a misnomer, since it is not a citrus but instead related to mulberries and figs (family Moraceae). It was originally native to parts of Oklahoma and Texas but is widely used as a hedge plant.
We had 'em where I grew up (South Suburbs of Chicago) as well. The grown-ups called the fruits “Hedge apples.” Us kids called 'em “Monkey Brains.” I don’t think they’re edible by humans, but they make great projectile weapons with huge homemade slingshots. (They’re big!) They’re also good for chucking at the ground really hard to watch them splat open like…well, like monkey brains, I guess.
Squirrels also use them as weapons. They’ll eat the seeds inside and chuck monkey brain parts at you when you walk under their tree.
They’re endemic here in Kansas City, and the squirrels love to dig into them and meticulously tear them apart to get to the seeds inside the fruit. I have two piles of shredded “hedgeapple” (as they are called here) from squirrel activity right out my window.
Here in the rural parts of the southwest, we call them Bois D’Arc (supposedly from the bow of Joan of Arc) or bodark. According to my book of firewood, it is the second heaviest and hardest tree around, second only to ironwood. If you want to cut one with a chainsaw, you’d better try it while it’s green, otherwise it’s impossible.
A co-worker ruined a saw cutting one up and had to buy a new bar and chain. He said he should have stopped when the chain was causing sparks on the bar…
We have one of these (I call them Hedge Apples, Ardred said “Osage Orange” yesterday but I’d never heard that) right outside our house and overhanging our roof.
Every few minutes we hear "THUMPthumpathumpathumpathumpa…thump.
The other day while hiking groceries up the stairs to our front door we heard a big one hit and roll off the roof. It got louder and louder until it popped out just above our heads. It missed us by just a few inches. These things are HEAVY and one of us would have been seriously injured if we’d been a few steps down at the time.
They’re fun in the winter because the squirrels (our resident group is Scarface, Mange and Normal) dig them up and eat the seeds, leaving little explosions of hedge apple all over the snow.
We have a gigantic crop this year, due, we suppose, to all the rain and cool temperatures this summer. There are probably 150-200 in the yard right now.
Note that “ironwood” is a very imprecise term used for many different trees and shrubs on a worldwide basis, some no more closely related than “well, they’re both trees”. It’s hard to say what tree your firewood book was referring to - on the North American continent, eastern hop hornbeam (Ostrya virginiana) and closely related species are sometimes called ironwood, but it likely meant desert or Arizona ironwood (Olneya tesota). The term “ironwood” is applied to many other species from other areas of the world, and there are many exotic hardwoods that are incredibly hard and dense, most of which no sane person would consider “firewood” of course. Lignum vitae (Guaiacum officinale) wood has a specific gravity of over 1.3, which means it sinks, as do other very dense woods. This is often listed as the densest wood, though there are other close contenders. This guy lists Osage orange under “very heavy wood”, with a specific gravity of 0.77 (it still floats, in other words), but lists a lot of heavier woods:
http://waynesword.palomar.edu/plsept99.htm
See his table of “ironwoods” further down the page.
Eggplant is not necessarily a misnomer
Being from the northwest, I’d never seen a hedge apple until an extended stay in Ohio. I researched them on the internet, finding many of the same links listed above, but the local use for the fruit of the osage orange was ‘spider repellent’.
Put a couple of hedge apples in your house, and you won’t have any spiders. Our purely anecdotal evidence (two years without, two years with) suggests that this is correct – but I’m willing to have this potential use examined and dissproved.
Another note - several custom luthiers have made guitars out of Osage Orange:
http://www.mcknightguitars.com/products.html
http://www.silphium.net/images/selmer_guitar/back.jpg
It seems to be gaining in popularity.
Does this tree grow in the Carolinian forest region? I live in the next zone north, and have never seen one.
Believe it or not, I have a hedge ball a couple of feet from my chair here.
They are supposed to keep various insects away. Perhaps that’s a wife’s tale, but Spiderman has yet to attack.
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I’ve seen one planted as far north as Ithaca, New York. If they survive around Chicago they should be able to do so in the Toronto area. However, they don’t occur naturally there and it would depend on whether or not people have planted them in the region.
Interesting. (In a very wood-geeky kind of way) You would think that “Poulan’s Complete Book of Firewood” would be more complete. It does say that a cord of “Ironwood” weighs 4400 pounds but I’m not sure how that equates to specific gravity. A cord of Osage Orange weighs 4100 pounds.
My parents had one in their yard. We called it the fruit Horse Apples, because my father was told when he was young that the fruit was poisonous to horses. I can guarantee you that the wood of this tree is very hard. It was blown down in a storm, and the man who cut it up for my parents had a very hard time cutting it up.
I’d heard a similar story about Horse Apples but instead of being poisonous, the horses would simply choke on the apples.
