What’s a Hedge Apple?

Hedge Apple is a literary magazine published more or less once a year by the students and faculty of Hagerstown Community College in Maryland.

How the heck did you come up with the name Hedge Apple?

Well, I’ll tell you…

On a grassy hillock between the classroom building and the library, stretches a stately row of Osage orange trees (Maclura pomifera), also known as bowwood, yellowwood, bois d’arc, and locally, hedge apples. The trees have thorny branches and dark-yellow tinged bark. But their most unusual characteristic is the fruit, a yellowish-green sphere with a wrinkled texture similar to a cortex. The fruit ripens in autumn and falls into the grass where it lies, bulbous and brainy, well into spring. The thick-boled, rough-barked trees, lined like the arcaded columns of a Romanesque terrace, and the distinctive fruit form one of the picturesque landmarks of the HCC campus.