Moved to Nashville, TN, and found a few of these in the backyard; they’re a bit bigger than a tennis ball (foot for scale) - it even has weird “seams” that seem to resemble a tennis ball’s construction. They’re presumably falling from a nearby tree, since they keep showing up unannounced, although I don’t see any hanging from any nearby trees.
A.K.A. mock orange, hedge apple, hedge, horse apple, monkey ball, monkey brains and yellow-wood
That was fast! Thanks!
You’re welcome. We have a lot of them where I live so I recognized the fruit right away.
There was a tree in my neighborhood when I was a kid. We called them monkey balls.
Wikipedia says that the fruit are often eaten by squirrels, so that could be how they’re getting to your yard. The tree itself could be a few hundred yards away.
They’re better transported to your yard than falling from a tree in your yard, as far as avoiding head injuries.
True, the trees are picturesque (there are a couple huge old specimens growing in a park in my area) and the fruits contain an insect-repelling sap (they’re not edible).
They are native to east Texas and make great bows.
Hence another name for the tree, “bodarK” from the French bois d’arc (wood of the bow).
Osage orange is one of the toughest woods imaginable.When freshly cut it will immediately sink in water it is so heavy. The wood is a nice orange but quickly fades. Chain saws can barely cut the fresh wood, they just generate smoke. When my step son was a new contractor he took on the job of clearing some lot lines to put up a fence. I took one look and told him he should have turned down the job of clearing osage orange. He knocked the bushes down with a Bobcat but was unable to cut them and stack them like the customer wanted.
I was going to guess black walnut. Apparently I’m not the only person to get them confused:
Yum, a latex secretor. No wonder we don’t eat it.
BTW, given you’ve got an answer, I’d like to point out that using your foot/shoe for scale may not work as well as you think. We have no idea if you’ve got basketball-player-sized feet or those of a small person.
Technically, squirrels just eat the seeds - they rip up the fruit into sticky shreds to get to them. I’m not sure anything actually eats the fruity bits, which makes why the plants put so much energy and material into them a bit of a puzzle.
Old wives spouses tale: put some around the house (whole, not sliced or cut) to repel cockroaches. Like under sofa, back of the pantry, etc. I haven’t tested this.
Around here (Kansas) these hedge balls are plentiful. Supposedly if you put them in the basement or close to windows they will repel crickets. We’ve done this for years and we haven’t repelled a single cricket.
The wood of the osage orange makes great fence posts, because it will last for decades before it rots. I know this for a fact. It also makes great wood for a fireplace.
Also, a chain saw, if properly sharpened, will cut through this wood. I can personally attest to this.
Put X on your windowsills to repel Y appears in various forms worldwide; typically these bits of folk wisdom are constructed so they can’t really ever be wrong. Here in the UK, it’s ‘Put conkers (horse chestnuts) on your windowsills to repel spiders’
If you do it and see no spiders, it obviously works.
If you do it and see spiders, but they are walking away from the conkers, it obviously works
If you do it and see spiders, but they are walking toward the conkers, you say “Well, they’ll soon learn” - you assume it’s about to start working.
I experimentally put a couple of osage oranges on a plant stand in my basement fluorescent light garden one time. If it did anything to repel insects, it was unnoticeable.
Yeah, growing up in Dallas we called them horse apples, and it was great fun to see how far you could throw 'em.
Early farmers in Kansas planted the Osage Orange along property lines. It wasn’t unusual to see a ‘hedgerow’ every quarter mile on some sections of land. This was done in lieu of fencing to keep in livestock, because the branches have long thorns that are quite painful when encountered (I speak from experience.)
There are still a few of these hedgerows standing, but most of them have been cut down and the stumps bulldozed out, to recapture land for tilling.
I have read that the animals that used to eat the fruit went extinct, and that is why the trees were found in a limited range before settlers started planting them far out of their range.