Nostalgia Yet Unshattered
When I was much younger, and my age was in the single digits, my mother's parents owned and ran a farm in rural Missouri (the nearest big city was St. Joseph, home of "Cherry Mash" candy bars, and I vividly remember seeing the huge, illuminated image of the candy bar on top of the building as we drove by on the highway). To a boy that age — at least to me — the farm was filled with mysteries and unusual discoveries.
One that I remembered, or believed that I remembered, concerned these unusual trees way out at the distant edge of the pasture, some distance from the pond. I don't remember the trees very well, but I remember their fruits: lemony-green, grapefruit-sized things covered with bumps and channels and looking very much like one imagined the brain to look (if it were green, of course). We knew these things by the name "hedge apples". Some of them ended up in the basement of my parents' house, apprently because of their supposed insect-repelling properties.
No one I talk to seems to have heard of hedge apples. For some time now I've wondered whether these things really existed or whether I somehow imagined them or conflated some other memories to produce the hedge-apple memory, but I've neglected to take simple steps to look into it. Then, as time passed, the memory grew into something that seemed delicate and vulnerable, and I hesitated to find out the answer, just in case I had made the whole thing up: I wasn't sure that I wanted to know the real-world truth.
Curiosity won and my memory of "hedge apples" is intact, unshattered. Phew.
It seems that the green things are indeed commonly known as "hedge apples" (and, among other things and not surprisingly, as "monkey brains"), and their alleged insect-repelling capabilities an enduring myth about them. They are the fruits of the [female] hedge apple tree, also known as the "Osage-Orange Tree", or Maclura pomifera, a tree native to eastern Texas and southern Oklahoma.
The trees themselves were strictly utilitarian, since they are universally described as unattractive. Their wood is very hard and burns very hot. They are also very tolerant of bad soil, drought, and high winds. Thus, they were sometimes planted in my part of the world as wind breaks. Apparently, they are also thorny and dense when trimmed as a hedge (hence "hedge apples"?), and thus frequently used as living fences to keep cattle inside their boundaries. Which led to this most curious observation:
The widespread planting of Osage-orange stopped with the introduction of barbed wire.
It comes from a short article "Hedge Apples", by Don Janssen, Extension Educator (apparently of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln), which in a very short space tells you most everything you might want to know about Hedge-Apple Trees.
I am a bit relieved to confirm that I hadn't imagined the entire thing. Sometimes my childhood memories, which create a vague pattern in mosaic with many pieces missing, turn out to have little to do with an actual, experienced reality. This is one that did.
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[Note added 9 September 2009:] For reasons that escape me, the article above by Don Janssen has been updated, shortened, and moved (I have changed the URL above to be current), and somewhere in that process the fascinating observation about the passing of the popularity of the Osage orange with the introduction of barbed-wire fencing has vanished. For more on that I suggest reading the "comment" below, actually a reference to another blog posting of mine in which I quote another author on the matter of the Hedgeapple tree and barbed wire.
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on Saturday, 9 February 2008 at 19.19
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