Cox's Orange Apple
Malus domestica
A mid-sized dessert apple, greenish-yellow to gold beneath an orange-red flush and broken red striping, with fine russet netting around the stalk cavity. The cream-coloured flesh is firm and fine-grained, aromatic, and balances sugar against a clear acidity. Raised at Colnbrook in Buckinghamshire in the 1820s and long the standard English eating apple; used fresh, juiced, and in cider blends.
A planted tree rather than a wild one: gardens, allotments, old commercial orchards, and occasionally a hedgerow, verge or railway embankment where a core has been thrown. Best on free-draining soil in southern and eastern England, and prone to scab and canker in wetter western districts.
The fruit is safe raw. The pips contain amygdalin and are better not chewed in quantity, though a few swallowed whole are of no consequence. Windfalls bruise and rot fast, so check for brown flesh and wasp holes. Orchard and garden trees are private property, and roadside fruit may carry spray drift or traffic residue.
Always use more than one reference to confirm a plant. You are responsible for what you choose to forage.
Fruit colour
Greenish-yellow to gold ground with an orange-red flush and short broken stripes, dulled by a fine russet net around the stalk cavity. Duller and more russeted than a shop-bought Gala, and never the plain unstriped green of a cooking apple such as Bramley.
Ripeness test
Cut one fruit across: ripe pips are dark brown, not white or pale tan, and in a fully ripe fruit the loose pips rattle when the apple is shaken. Green ground colour with pale pips means it is worth leaving another fortnight.
Flesh and flavour
Cream to pale yellow, fine-grained and firm rather than crisp-watery, with a strongly aromatic pear-and-orange note behind the sweetness. A coarse, sharply acid flesh that collapses on cooking points to a culinary variety instead.
Tree and habit
A moderate, spreading tree, rarely large, often carrying scab spots on leaves and fruit and canker on older branches in damp sites. It is not self-fertile, so an isolated apple in a hedge with no other tree in flowering range is more likely a chance seedling than a grafted Cox.
Updated 2026-08-07T20:57:58.700Z · Part of the shared Foragers Log catalogue · Fruit