He, as it were,
tramples
down oaks unwittingly in his walk, or at most
sees only their shadows.
sees only their shadows.
Thoreau - Excursions and Poems
As I look up
the main street, they appear like painted screens standing before the
houses; yet many are green. But now, or generally by the seventeenth
of October, when almost all red maples and some white maples are bare,
the large sugar maples also are in their glory, glowing with yellow
and red, and show unexpectedly bright and delicate tints. They are
remarkable for the contrast they often afford of deep blushing red on
one half and green on the other. They become at length dense masses of
rich yellow with a deep scarlet blush, or more than blush, on the
exposed surfaces. They are the brightest trees now in the street.
The large ones on our Common are particularly beautiful. A delicate
but warmer than golden yellow is now the prevailing color, with
scarlet cheeks. Yet, standing on the east side of the Common just
before sundown, when the western light is transmitted through them, I
see that their yellow even, compared with the pale lemon yellow of an
elm close by, amounts to a scarlet, without noticing the bright
scarlet portions. Generally, they are great regular oval masses of
yellow and scarlet. All the sunny warmth of the season, the Indian
summer, seems to be absorbed in their leaves. The lowest and inmost
leaves next the bole are, as usual, of the most delicate yellow and
green, like the complexion of young men brought up in the house. There
is an auction on the Common to-day, but its red flag is hard to be
discerned amid this blaze of color.
Little did the fathers of the town anticipate this brilliant success,
when they caused to be imported from farther in the country some
straight poles with their tops cut off, which they called sugar
maples; and, as I remember, after they were set out, a neighboring
merchant's clerk, by way of jest, planted beans about them. Those
which were then jestingly called bean-poles are to-day far the most
beautiful objects noticeable in our streets. They are worth all and
more than they have cost,--though one of the selectmen, while setting
them out, took the cold which occasioned his death,--if only because
they have filled the open eyes of children with their rich color
unstintedly so many Octobers. We will not ask them to yield us sugar
in the spring, while they afford us so fair a prospect in the autumn.
Wealth indoors may be the inheritance of few, but it is equally
distributed on the Common. All children alike can revel in this golden
harvest.
Surely trees should be set in our streets with a view to their October
splendor, though I doubt whether this is ever considered by the "Tree
Society. " Do you not think it will make some odds to these children
that they were brought up under the maples? Hundreds of eyes are
steadily drinking in this color, and by these teachers even the
truants are caught and educated the moment they step abroad. Indeed,
neither the truant nor the studious is at present taught color in the
schools. These are instead of the bright colors in apothecaries'
shops and city windows. It is a pity that we have no more _red_
maples, and some hickories, in our streets as well. Our paint-box is
very imperfectly filled. Instead of, or beside, supplying such
paint-boxes as we do, we might supply these natural colors to the
young. Where else will they study color under greater advantages? What
School of Design can vie with this? Think how much the eyes of
painters of all kinds, and of manufacturers of cloth and paper, and
paper-stainers, and countless others, are to be educated by these
autumnal colors. The stationer's envelopes may be of very various
tints, yet not so various as those of the leaves of a single tree. If
you want a different shade or tint of a particular color, you have
only to look farther within or without the tree or the wood. These
leaves are not many dipped in one dye, as at the dye-house, but they
are dyed in light of infinitely various degrees of strength and left
to set and dry there.
Shall the names of so many of our colors continue to be derived from
those of obscure foreign localities, as Naples yellow, Prussian blue,
raw Sienna, burnt Umber, Gamboge? (surely the Tyrian purple must have
faded by this time), or from comparatively trivial articles of
commerce,--chocolate, lemon, coffee, cinnamon, claret? (shall we
compare our hickory to a lemon, or a lemon to a hickory? ) or from ores
and oxides which few ever see? Shall we so often, when describing to
our neighbors the color of something we have seen, refer them, not to
some natural object in our neighborhood, but perchance to a bit of
earth fetched from the other side of the planet, which possibly they
may find at the apothecary's, but which probably neither they nor we
ever saw? Have we not an _earth_ under our feet,--aye, and a sky over
our heads? Or is the last _all_ ultramarine? What do we know of
sapphire, amethyst, emerald, ruby, amber, and the like,--most of us
who take these names in vain? Leave these precious words to
cabinet-keepers, virtuosos, and maids-of-honor,--to the Nabobs,
Begums, and Chobdars of Hindostan, or wherever else. I do not see why,
since America and her autumn woods have been discovered, our leaves
should not compete with the precious stones in giving names to colors;
and, indeed, I believe that in course of time the names of some of our
trees and shrubs, as well as flowers, will get into our popular
chromatic nomenclature.
But of much more importance than a knowledge of the names and
distinctions of color is the joy and exhilaration which these colored
leaves excite. Already these brilliant trees throughout the street,
without any more variety, are at least equal to an annual festival and
holiday, or a week of such. These are cheap and innocent gala-days,
celebrated by one and all without the aid of committees or marshals,
such a show as may safely be licensed, not attracting gamblers or
rum-sellers, not requiring any special police to keep the peace. And
poor indeed must be that New England village's October which has not
the maple in its streets. This October festival costs no powder, nor
ringing of bells, but every tree is a living liberty-pole on which a
thousand bright flags are waving.
No wonder that we must have our annual cattle-show, and fall training,
and perhaps cornwallis, our September courts, and the like. Nature
herself holds her annual fair in October, not only in the streets, but
in every hollow and on every hillside. When lately we looked into that
red maple swamp all ablaze, where the trees were clothed in their
vestures of most dazzling tints, did it not suggest a thousand gypsies
beneath,--a race capable of wild delight,--or even the fabled fauns,
satyrs, and wood-nymphs come back to earth? Or was it only a
congregation of wearied woodchoppers, or of proprietors come to
inspect their lots, that we thought of? Or, earlier still, when we
paddled on the river through that fine-grained September air, did
there not appear to be something new going on under the sparkling
surface of the stream, a shaking of props, at least, so that we made
haste in order to be up in time? Did not the rows of yellowing willows
and button-bushes on each side seem like rows of booths, under which,
perhaps, some fluviatile egg-pop equally yellow was effervescing? Did
not all these suggest that man's spirits should rise as high as
Nature's,--should hang out their flag, and the routine of his life be
interrupted by an analogous expression of joy and hilarity?
No annual training or muster of soldiery, no celebration with its
scarfs and banners, could import into the town a hundredth part of the
annual splendor of our October. We have only to set the trees, or let
them stand, and Nature will find the colored drapery,--flags of all
her nations, some of whose private signals hardly the botanist can
read,--while we walk under the triumphal arches of the elms. Leave it
to Nature to appoint the days, whether the same as in neighboring
States or not, and let the clergy read her proclamations, if they can
understand them. Behold what a brilliant drapery is her woodbine flag!
What public-spirited merchant, think you, has contributed this part of
the show? There is no handsomer shingling and paint than this vine, at
present covering a whole side of some houses. I do not believe that
the ivy _never sere_ is comparable to it. No wonder it has been
extensively introduced into London. Let us have a good many maples and
hickories and scarlet oaks, then, I say. Blaze away! Shall that dirty
roll of bunting in the gun-house be all the colors a village can
display? A village is not complete, unless it have these trees to mark
the season in it. They are important, like the town clock. A village
that has them not will not be found to work well. It has a screw
loose, an essential part is wanting. Let us have willows for spring,
elms for summer, maples and walnuts and tupeloes for autumn,
evergreens for winter, and oaks for all seasons. What is a gallery in
a house to a gallery in the streets, which every market-man rides
through, whether he will or not? Of course, there is not a
picture-gallery in the country which would be worth so much to us as
is the western view at sunset under the elms of our main street. They
are the frame to a picture which is daily painted behind them. An
avenue of elms as large as our largest and three miles long would seem
to lead to some admirable place, though only C---- were at the end of
it.
A village needs these innocent stimulants of bright and cheering
prospects to keep off melancholy and superstition. Show me two
villages, one embowered in trees and blazing with all the glories of
October, the other a merely trivial and treeless waste, or with only a
single tree or two for suicides, and I shall be sure that in the
latter will be found the most starved and bigoted religionists and the
most desperate drinkers. Every wash-tub and milk-can and gravestone
will be exposed. The inhabitants will disappear abruptly behind their
barns and houses, like desert Arabs amid their rocks, and I shall look
to see spears in their hands. They will be ready to accept the most
barren and forlorn doctrine,--as that the world is speedily coming to
an end, or has already got to it, or that they themselves are turned
wrong side outward. They will perchance crack their dry joints at one
another and call it a spiritual communication.
But to confine ourselves to the maples. What if we were to take half
as much pains in protecting them as we do in setting them out,--not
stupidly tie our horses to our dahlia stems?
What meant the fathers by establishing this _perfectly living_
institution before the church,--this institution which needs no
repairing nor repainting, which is continually enlarged and repaired
by its growth? Surely they
"Wrought in a sad sincerity;
Themselves from God they could not free;
They _planted_ better than they knew;--
The conscious _trees_ to beauty grew. "
Verily these maples are cheap preachers, permanently settled, which
preach their half-century, and century, aye, and century-and-a-half
sermons, with constantly increasing unction and influence, ministering
to many generations of men; and the least we can do is to supply them
with suitable colleagues as they grow infirm.
THE SCARLET OAK
Belonging to a genus which is remarkable for the beautiful form of its
leaves, I suspect that some scarlet oak leaves surpass those of all
other oaks in the rich and wild beauty of their outlines. I judge from
an acquaintance with twelve species, and from drawings which I have
seen of many others.
Stand under this tree and see how finely its leaves are cut against
the sky,--as it were, only a few sharp points extending from a midrib.
They look like double, treble, or quadruple crosses. They are far more
ethereal than the less deeply scalloped oak leaves. They have so
little leafy _terra firma_ that they appear melting away in the light,
and scarcely obstruct our view. The leaves of very young plants are,
like those of full-grown oaks of other species, more entire, simple,
and lumpish in their outlines, but these, raised high on old trees,
have solved the leafy problem. Lifted higher and higher, and
sublimated more and more, putting off some earthiness and cultivating
more intimacy with the light each year, they have at length the least
possible amount of earthy matter, and the greatest spread and grasp of
skyey influences. There they dance, arm in arm with the
light,--tripping it on fantastic points, fit partners in those aerial
halls. So intimately mingled are they with it, that, what with their
slenderness and their glossy surfaces, you can hardly tell at last
what in the dance is leaf and what is light. And when no zephyr stirs,
they are at most but a rich tracery to the forest windows.
I am again struck with their beauty, when, a month later, they thickly
strew the ground in the woods, piled one upon another under my feet.
They are then brown above, but purple beneath. With their narrow lobes
and their bold, deep scallops reaching almost to the middle, they
suggest that the material must be cheap, or else there has been a
lavish expense in their creation, as if so much had been cut out. Or
else they seem to us the remnants of the stuff out of which leaves
have been cut with a die. Indeed, when they lie thus one upon another,
they remind me of a pile of scrap-tin.
Or bring one home, and study it closely at your leisure, by the
fireside. It is a type, not from any Oxford font, not in the Basque
nor the arrow-headed character, not found on the Rosetta Stone, but
destined to be copied in sculpture one day, if they ever get to
whittling stone here. What a wild and pleasing outline, a combination
of graceful curves and angles! The eye rests with equal delight on
what is not leaf and on what is leaf,--on the broad, free, open
sinuses, and on the long, sharp, bristle-pointed lobes. A simple oval
outline would include it all, if you connected the points of the leaf;
but how much richer is it than that, with its half-dozen deep
scallops, in which the eye and thought of the beholder are embayed! If
I were a drawing-master, I would set my pupils to copying these
leaves, that they might learn to draw firmly and gracefully.
Regarded as water, it is like a pond with half a dozen broad rounded
promontories extending nearly to its middle, half from each side,
while its watery bays extend far inland, like sharp friths, at each of
whose heads several fine streams empty in,--almost a leafy
archipelago.
But it oftener suggests land, and, as Dionysius and Pliny compared the
form of the Morea to that of the leaf of the Oriental plane tree, so
this leaf reminds me of some fair wild island in the ocean, whose
extensive coast, alternate rounded bays with smooth strands, and
sharp-pointed rocky capes, mark it as fitted for the habitation of
man, and destined to become a centre of civilization at last. To the
sailor's eye, it is a much indented shore. Is it not, in fact, a shore
to the aerial ocean, on which the windy surf beats? At sight of this
leaf we are all mariners,--if not vikings, buccaneers, and
filibusters. Both our love of repose and our spirit of adventure are
addressed. In our most casual glance, perchance, we think that if we
succeed in doubling those sharp capes we shall find deep, smooth, and
secure havens in the ample bays. How different from the white oak
leaf, with its rounded headlands, on which no lighthouse need be
placed! That is an England, with its long civil history, that may be
read. This is some still unsettled New-found Island or Celebes. Shall
we go and be rajahs there?
By the twenty-sixth of October the large scarlet oaks are in their
prime, when other oaks are usually withered. They have been kindling
their fires for a week past, and now generally burst into a blaze.
This alone of _our_ indigenous deciduous trees (excepting the
dogwood, of which I do not know half a dozen, and they are but large
bushes) is now in its glory. The two aspens and the sugar maple come
nearest to it in date, but they have lost the greater part of their
leaves. Of evergreens, only the pitch pine is still commonly bright.
But it requires a particular alertness, if not devotion to these
phenomena, to appreciate the wide-spread, but late and unexpected
glory of the scarlet oaks. I do not speak here of the small trees and
shrubs, which are commonly observed, and which are now withered, but
of the large trees. Most go in and shut their doors, thinking that
bleak and colorless November has already come, when some of the most
brilliant and memorable colors are not yet lit.
This very perfect and vigorous one, about forty feet high, standing in
an open pasture, which was quite glossy green on the twelfth, is now,
the twenty-sixth, completely changed to bright dark-scarlet,--every
leaf, between you and the sun, as if it had been dipped into a scarlet
dye. The whole tree is much like a heart in form, as well as color.
Was not this worth waiting for? Little did you think, ten days ago,
that that cold green tree would assume such color as this. Its leaves
are still firmly attached, while those of other trees are falling
around it. It seems to say: "I am the last to blush, but I blush
deeper than any of ye. I bring up the rear in my red coat. We scarlet
ones, alone of oaks, have not given up the fight. "
The sap is now, and even far into November, frequently flowing fast in
these trees, as in maples in the spring; and apparently their bright
tints, now that most other oaks are withered, are connected with this
phenomenon. They are full of life. It has a pleasantly astringent,
acorn-like taste, this strong oak wine, as I find on tapping them with
my knife.
Looking across this woodland valley, a quarter of a mile wide, how
rich those scarlet oaks embosomed in pines, their bright red branches
intimately intermingled with them! They have their full effect there.
The pine boughs are the green calyx to their red petals. Or, as we go
along a road in the woods, the sun striking endwise through it, and
lighting up the red tents of the oaks, which on each side are mingled
with the liquid green of the pines, makes a very gorgeous scene.
Indeed, without the evergreens for contrast, the autumnal tints would
lose much of their effect.
The scarlet oak asks a clear sky and the brightness of late October
days. These bring out its colors. If the sun goes into a cloud they
become comparatively indistinct. As I sit on a cliff in the southwest
part of our town, the sun is now getting low, and the woods in
Lincoln, south and east of me, are lit up by its more level rays; and
in the scarlet oaks, scattered so equally over the forest, there is
brought out a more brilliant redness than I had believed was in them.
Every tree of this species which is visible in those directions, even
to the horizon, now stands out distinctly red. Some great ones lift
their red backs high above the woods, in the next town, like huge
roses with a myriad of fine petals; and some more slender ones, in a
small grove of white pines on Pine Hill in the east, on the very verge
of the horizon, alternating with the pines on the edge of the grove,
and shouldering them with their red coats, look like soldiers in red
amid hunters in green. This time it is Lincoln green, too. Till the
sun got low, I did not believe that there were so many redcoats in the
forest army. Theirs is an intense, burning red, which would lose some
of its strength, methinks, with every step you might take toward them;
for the shade that lurks amid their foliage does not report itself at
this distance, and they are unanimously red. The focus of their
reflected color is in the atmosphere far on this side. Every such tree
becomes a nucleus of red, as it were, where, with the declining sun,
that color grows and glows. It is partly borrowed fire, gathering
strength from the sun on its way to your eye. It has only some
comparatively dull red leaves for a rallying-point, or kindling-stuff,
to start it, and it becomes an intense scarlet or red mist, or fire,
which finds fuel for itself in the very atmosphere. So vivacious is
redness. The very rails reflect a rosy light at this hour and season.
You see a redder tree than exists.
If you wish to count the scarlet oaks, do it now. In a clear day stand
thus on a hilltop in the woods, when the sun is an hour high, and
every one within range of your vision, excepting in the west, will be
revealed. You might live to the age of Methuselah and never find a
tithe of them, otherwise. Yet sometimes even in a dark day I have
thought them as bright as I ever saw them. Looking westward, their
colors are lost in a blaze of light; but in other directions the whole
forest is a flower-garden, in which these late roses burn, alternating
with green, while the so-called "gardeners," walking here and there,
perchance, beneath, with spade and water-pot, see only a few little
asters amid withered leaves.
These are _my_ China-asters, _my_ late garden-flowers. It costs me
nothing for a gardener. The falling leaves, all over the forest, are
protecting the roots of my plants. Only look at what is to be seen,
and you will have garden enough, without deepening the soil in your
yard. We have only to elevate our view a little, to see the whole
forest as a garden. The blossoming of the scarlet oak,--the
forest-flower, surpassing all in splendor (at least since the maple)!
I do not know but they interest me more than the maples, they are so
widely and equally dispersed throughout the forest; they are so hardy,
a nobler tree on the whole; our chief November flower, abiding the
approach of winter with us, imparting warmth to early November
prospects. It is remarkable that the latest bright color that is
general should be this deep, dark scarlet and red, the intensest of
colors. The ripest fruit of the year; like the cheek of a hard, glossy
red apple, from the cold Isle of Orleans, which will not be mellow for
eating till next spring! When I rise to a hilltop, a thousand of these
great oak roses, distributed on every side, as far as the horizon! I
admire them four or five miles off! This my unfailing prospect for a
fortnight past! This late forest-flower surpasses all that spring or
summer could do. Their colors were but rare and dainty specks
comparatively (created for the near-sighted, who walk amid the
humblest herbs and underwoods), and made no impression on a distant
eye. Now it is an extended forest or a mountain-side, through or along
which we journey from day to day, that bursts into bloom.
Comparatively, our gardening is on a petty scale,--the gardener still
nursing a few asters amid dead weeds, ignorant of the gigantic asters
and roses which, as it were, overshadow him, and ask for none of his
care. It is like a little red paint ground on a saucer, and held up
against the sunset sky. Why not take more elevated and broader views,
walk in the great garden; not skulk in a little "debauched" nook of
it? consider the beauty of the forest, and not merely of a few
impounded herbs?
Let your walks now be a little more adventurous; ascend the hills. If,
about the last of October, you ascend any hill in the outskirts of our
town, and probably of yours, and look over the forest, you may
see--well, what I have endeavored to describe. All this you surely
_will_ see, and much more, if you are prepared to see it,--if you
_look_ for it. Otherwise, regular and universal as this phenomenon is,
whether you stand on the hilltop or in the hollow, you will think for
threescore years and ten that all the wood is, at this season, sere
and brown. Objects are concealed from our view, not so much because
they are out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not
bring our minds and eyes to bear on them; for there is no power to see
in the eye itself, any more than in any other jelly. We do not realize
how far and widely, or how near and narrowly, we are to look. The
greater part of the phenomena of Nature are for this reason concealed
from us all our lives. The gardener sees only the gardener's garden.
Here, too, as in political economy, the supply answers to the demand.
Nature does not cast pearls before swine. There is just as much
beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to
appreciate,--not a grain more. The actual objects which one man will
see from a particular hilltop are just as different from those which
another will see as the beholders are different. The scarlet oak must,
in a sense, be in your eye when you go forth. We cannot see anything
until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our
heads,--and then we can hardly see anything else. In my botanical
rambles I find that, first, the idea, or image, of a plant occupies my
thoughts, though it may seem very foreign to this locality,--no nearer
than Hudson's Bay,--and for some weeks or months I go thinking of it,
and expecting it, unconsciously, and at length I surely see it. This
is the history of my finding a score or more of rare plants which I
could name. A man sees only what concerns him. A botanist absorbed in
the study of grasses does not distinguish the grandest pasture oaks.
He, as it were, tramples down oaks unwittingly in his walk, or at most
sees only their shadows. I have found that it required a different
intention of the eye, in the same locality, to see different plants,
even when they were closely allied, as _Juncaceae_ and _Gramineae_:
when I was looking for the former, I did not see the latter in the
midst of them. How much more, then, it requires different intentions
of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of
knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at
objects!
Take a New England selectman, and set him on the highest of our hills,
and tell him to look,--sharpening his sight to the utmost, and putting
on the glasses that suit him best (aye, using a spy-glass, if he
likes),--and make a full report. What, probably, will he _spy_? --what
will he _select_ to look at? Of course, he will see a Brocken spectre
of himself. He will see several meeting-houses, at least, and,
perhaps, that somebody ought to be assessed higher than he is, since
he has so handsome a wood-lot. Now take Julius Caesar, or Emanuel
Swedenborg, or a Fiji-Islander, and set him up there. Or suppose all
together, and let them compare notes afterward. Will it appear that
they have enjoyed the same prospect? What they will see will be as
different as Rome was from heaven or hell, or the last from the Fiji
Islands. For aught we know, as strange a man as any of these is always
at our elbow.
Why, it takes a sharpshooter to bring down even such trivial game as
snipes and woodcocks; he must take very particular aim, and know what
he is aiming at. He would stand a very small chance, if he fired at
random into the sky, being told that snipes were flying there. And so
is it with him that shoots at beauty; though he wait till the sky
falls, he will not bag any, if he does not already know its seasons
and haunts, and the color of its wing,--if he has not dreamed of it,
so that he can _anticipate_ it; then, indeed, he flushes it at every
step, shoots double and on the wing, with both barrels, even in
corn-fields. The sportsman trains himself, dresses, and watches
unweariedly, and loads and primes for his particular game. He prays
for it, and offers sacrifices, and so he gets it. After due and long
preparation, schooling his eye and hand, dreaming awake and asleep,
with gun and paddle and boat, he goes out after meadow-hens, which
most of his townsmen never saw nor dreamed of, and paddles for miles
against a head wind, and wades in water up to his knees, being out all
day without his dinner, and _therefore_ he gets them. He had them
half-way into his bag when he started, and has only to shove them
down. The true sportsman can shoot you almost any of his game from his
windows: what else has he windows or eyes for? It comes and perches at
last on the barrel of his gun; but the rest of the world never see it
_with the feathers on_. The geese fly exactly under his zenith, and
honk when they get there, and he will keep himself supplied by firing
up his chimney; twenty musquash have the refusal of each one of his
traps before it is empty. If he lives, and his game spirit increases,
heaven and earth shall fail him sooner than game; and when he dies, he
will go to more extensive and, perchance, happier hunting-grounds. The
fisherman, too, dreams of fish, sees a bobbing cork in his dreams,
till he can almost catch them in his sink-spout. I knew a girl who,
being sent to pick huckleberries, picked wild gooseberries by the
quart, where no one else knew that there were any, because she was
accustomed to pick them up-country where she came from. The astronomer
knows where to go star-gathering, and sees one clearly in his mind
before any have seen it with a glass. The hen scratches and finds her
food right under where she stands; but such is not the way with the
hawk.
* * * * *
These bright leaves which I have mentioned are not the exception, but
the rule; for I believe that all leaves, even grasses and mosses,
acquire brighter colors just before their fall. When you come to
observe faithfully the changes of each humblest plant, you find that
each has, sooner or later, its peculiar autumnal tint; and if you
undertake to make a complete list of the bright tints, it will be
nearly as long as a catalogue of the plants in your vicinity.
WILD APPLES
THE HISTORY OF THE APPLE TREE
It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is
connected with that of man. The geologist tells us that the order of
the _Rosaceae_, which includes the apple, also the true grasses, and
the _Labiatae_, or mints, were introduced only a short time previous
to the appearance of man on the globe.
It appears that apples made a part of the food of that unknown
primitive people whose traces have lately been found at the bottom of
the Swiss lakes, supposed to be older than the foundation of Rome, so
old that they had no metallic implements. An entire black and
shriveled crab-apple has been recovered from their stores.
Tacitus says of the ancient Germans that they satisfied their hunger
with wild apples (_agrestia poma_), among other things.
Niebuhr observes that "the words for a house, a field, a plow,
plowing, wine, oil, milk, sheep, apples, and others relating to
agriculture and the gentler way of life, agree in Latin and Greek,
while the Latin words for all objects pertaining to war or the chase
are utterly alien from the Greek. " Thus the apple tree may be
considered a symbol of peace no less than the olive.
The apple was early so important, and generally distributed, that its
name traced to its root in many languages signifies fruit in general.
? ? ? ? ? , in Greek, means an apple, also the fruit of other trees, also a
sheep and any cattle, and finally riches in general.
The apple tree has been celebrated by the Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, and
Scandinavians. Some have thought that the first human pair were
tempted by its fruit. Goddesses are fabled to have contended for it,
dragons were set to watch it, and heroes were employed to pluck it.
The tree is mentioned in at least three places in the Old Testament,
and its fruit in two or three more. Solomon sings, "As the apple-tree
among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. " And
again, "Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples. " The noblest
part of man's noblest feature is named from this fruit, "the apple of
the eye. "
The apple tree is also mentioned by Homer and Herodotus. Ulysses saw
in the glorious garden of Alcinous "pears and pomegranates, and apple
trees bearing beautiful fruit" (? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ). And according
to Homer, apples were among the fruits which Tantalus could not pluck,
the wind ever blowing their boughs away from him. Theophrastus knew and
described the apple tree as a botanist.
According to the Prose Edda, "Iduna keeps in a box the apples which
the gods, when they feel old age approaching, have only to taste of to
become young again. It is in this manner that they will be kept in
renovated youth until Ragnarok" (or the destruction of the gods).
I learn from Loudon that "the ancient Welsh bards were rewarded for
excelling in song by the token of the apple-spray;" and "in the
Highlands of Scotland the apple-tree is the badge of the clan Lamont. "
The apple tree (_Pyrus malus_) belongs chiefly to the northern
temperate zone. Loudon says that "it grows spontaneously in every part
of Europe except the frigid zone, and throughout Western Asia, China,
and Japan. " We have also two or three varieties of the apple
indigenous in North America. The cultivated apple tree was first
introduced into this country by the earliest settlers, and is thought
to do as well or better here than anywhere else. Probably some of the
varieties which are now cultivated were first introduced into Britain
by the Romans.
Pliny, adopting the distinction of Theophrastus, says, "Of trees there
are some which are altogether wild (_sylvestres_), some more civilized
(_urbaniores_). " Theophrastus includes the apple among the last; and,
indeed, it is in this sense the most civilized of all trees. It is as
harmless as a dove, as beautiful as a rose, and as valuable as flocks
and herds. It has been longer cultivated than any other, and so is
more humanized; and who knows but, like the dog, it will at length be
no longer traceable to its wild original? It migrates with man, like
the dog and horse and cow: first, perchance, from Greece to Italy,
thence to England, thence to America; and our Western emigrant is
still marching steadily toward the setting sun with the seeds of the
apple in his pocket, or perhaps a few young trees strapped to his
load. At least a million apple trees are thus set farther westward
this year than any cultivated ones grew last year. Consider how the
Blossom Week, like the Sabbath, is thus annually spreading over the
prairies; for when man migrates, he carries with him not only his
birds, quadrupeds, insects, vegetables, and his very sward, but his
orchard also.
The leaves and tender twigs are an agreeable food to many domestic
animals, as the cow, horse, sheep, and goat; and the fruit is sought
after by the first, as well as by the hog. Thus there appears to have
existed a natural alliance between these animals and this tree from
the first. "The fruit of the crab in the forests of France" is said to
be "a great resource for the wild boar. "
Not only the Indian, but many indigenous insects, birds, and
quadrupeds, welcomed the apple tree to these shores. The tent
caterpillar saddled her eggs on the very first twig that was formed,
and it has since shared her affections with the wild cherry; and the
canker-worm also in a measure abandoned the elm to feed on it. As it
grew apace, the bluebird, robin, cherry-bird, kingbird, and many more
came with haste and built their nests and warbled in its boughs, and
so became orchard-birds, and multiplied more than ever. It was an era
in the history of their race. The downy woodpecker found such a savory
morsel under its bark that he perforated it in a ring quite round the
tree, before he left it,--a thing which he had never done before, to
my knowledge. It did not take the partridge long to find out how sweet
its buds were, and every winter eve she flew, and still flies, from
the wood, to pluck them, much to the farmer's sorrow. The rabbit, too,
was not slow to learn the taste of its twigs and bark; and when the
fruit was ripe, the squirrel half rolled, half carried it to his hole;
and even the musquash crept up the bank from the brook at evening, and
greedily devoured it, until he had worn a path in the grass there; and
when it was frozen and thawed, the crow and the jay were glad to taste
it occasionally. The owl crept into the first apple tree that became
hollow, and fairly hooted with delight, finding it just the place for
him; so, settling down into it, he has remained there ever since.
My theme being the Wild Apple, I will merely glance at some of the
seasons in the annual growth of the cultivated apple, and pass on to
my special province.
The flowers of the apple are perhaps the most beautiful of any tree's,
so copious and so delicious to both sight and scent. The walker is
frequently tempted to turn and linger near some more than usually
handsome one, whose blossoms are two-thirds expanded. How superior it
is in these respects to the pear, whose blossoms are neither colored
nor fragrant!
By the middle of July, green apples are so large as to remind us of
coddling, and of the autumn. The sward is commonly strewed with little
ones which fall stillborn, as it were,--Nature thus thinning them for
us. The Roman writer Palladius said, "If apples are inclined to fall
before their time, a stone placed in a split root will retain them. "
Some such notion, still surviving, may account for some of the stones
which we see placed, to be overgrown, in the forks of trees. They have
a saying in Suffolk, England,--
"At Michaelmas time, or a little before,
Half an apple goes to the core. "
Early apples begin to be ripe about the first of August; but I think
that none of them are so good to eat as some to smell. One is worth
more to scent your handkerchief with than any perfume which they sell
in the shops. The fragrance of some fruits is not to be forgotten,
along with that of flowers. Some gnarly apple which I pick up in the
road reminds me by its fragrance of all the wealth of Pomona,--carrying
me forward to those days when they will be collected in golden and
ruddy heaps in the orchards and about the cider-mills.
A week or two later, as you are going by orchards or gardens,
especially in the evenings, you pass through a little region possessed
by the fragrance of ripe apples, and thus enjoy them without price,
and without robbing anybody.
There is thus about all natural products a certain volatile and
ethereal quality which represents their highest value, and which
cannot be vulgarized, or bought and sold. No mortal has ever enjoyed
the perfect flavor of any fruit, and only the godlike among men begin
to taste its ambrosial qualities. For nectar and ambrosia are only
those fine flavors of every earthly fruit which our coarse palates
fail to perceive,--just as we occupy the heaven of the gods without
knowing it. When I see a particularly mean man carrying a load of fair
and fragrant early apples to market, I seem to see a contest going on
between him and his horse, on the one side, and the apples on the
other, and, to my mind, the apples always gain it. Pliny says that
apples are the heaviest of all things, and that the oxen begin to
sweat at the mere sight of a load of them. Our driver begins to lose
his load the moment he tries to transport them to where they do not
belong, that is, to any but the most beautiful. Though he gets out
from time to time, and feels of them, and thinks they are all there, I
see the stream of their evanescent and celestial qualities going to
heaven from his cart, while the pulp and skin and core only are going
to market. They are not apples, but pomace. Are not these still
Iduna's apples, the taste of which keeps the gods forever young? and
think you that they will let Loki or Thjassi carry them off to
Jotunheim, while they grow wrinkled and gray? No, for Ragnarok, or the
destruction of the gods, is not yet.
There is another thinning of the fruit, commonly near the end of
August or in September, when the ground is strewn with windfalls; and
this happens especially when high winds occur after rain. In some
orchards you may see fully three quarters of the whole crop on the
ground, lying in a circular form beneath the trees, yet hard and
green, or, if it is a hillside, rolled far down the hill. However, it
is an ill wind that blows nobody any good. All the country over,
people are busy picking up the windfalls, and this will make them
cheap for early apple pies.
In October, the leaves falling, the apples are more distinct on the
trees. I saw one year in a neighboring town some trees fuller of fruit
than I remember to have ever seen before, small yellow apples hanging
over the road. The branches were gracefully drooping with their
weight, like a barberry bush, so that the whole tree acquired a new
character. Even the topmost branches, instead of standing erect,
spread and drooped in all directions; and there were so many poles
supporting the lower ones that they looked like pictures of banyan
trees. As an old English manuscript says, "The mo appelen the tree
bereth the more sche boweth to the folk. "
Surely the apple is the noblest of fruits. Let the most beautiful or
the swiftest have it. That should be the "going" price of apples.
Between the 5th and 20th of October I see the barrels lie under the
trees. And perhaps I talk with one who is selecting some choice
barrels to fulfill an order. He turns a specked one over many times
before he leaves it out. If I were to tell what is passing in my mind,
I should say that every one was specked which he had handled; for he
rubs off all the bloom, and those fugacious ethereal qualities leave
it. Cool evenings prompt the farmers to make haste, and at length I
see only the ladders here and there left leaning against the trees.
It would be well, if we accepted these gifts with more joy and
gratitude, and did not think it enough simply to put a fresh load of
compost about the tree. Some old English customs are suggestive at
least. I find them described chiefly in Brand's "Popular Antiquities. "
It appears that "on Christmas Eve the farmers and their men in
Devonshire take a large bowl of cider, with a toast in it, and
carrying it in state to the orchard, they salute the apple-trees with
much ceremony, in order to make them bear well the next season. " This
salutation consists in "throwing some of the cider about the roots of
the tree, placing bits of the toast on the branches," and then,
"encircling one of the best bearing trees in the orchard, they drink
the following toast three several times:--
'Here's to thee, old apple tree,
Whence thou mayst bud, and whence thou mayst blow,
And whence thou mayst bear apples enow!
Hats-full! caps-full!
Bushel, bushel, sacks-full!
And my pockets full, too! Hurra! '"
Also what was called "apple-howling" used to be practiced in various
counties of England on New Year's Eve. A troop of boys visited the
different orchards, and, encircling the apple trees, repeated the
following words:--
"Stand fast, root! bear well, top!
Pray God send us a good howling crop:
Every twig, apples big;
Every bough, apples enow! "
"They then shout in chorus, one of the boys accompanying them on a
cow's horn. During this ceremony they rap the trees with their
sticks. " This is called "wassailing" the trees, and is thought by some
to be "a relic of the heathen sacrifice to Pomona. "
Herrick sings,--
"Wassaile the trees that they may beare
You many a plum and many a peare;
For more or less fruits they will bring
As you so give them wassailing. "
Our poets have as yet a better right to sing of cider than of wine;
but it behooves them to sing better than English Phillips did, else
they will do no credit to their Muse.
THE WILD APPLE
So much for the more civilized apple trees (_urbaniores_, as Pliny
calls them). I love better to go through the old orchards of ungrafted
apple trees, at what ever season of the year,--so irregularly planted:
sometimes two trees standing close together; and the rows so devious
that you would think that they not only had grown while the owner was
sleeping, but had been set out by him in a somnambulic state. The rows
of grafted fruit will never tempt me to wander amid them like these.
But I now, alas, speak rather from memory than from any recent
experience, such ravages have been made!
Some soils, like a rocky tract called the Easterbrooks Country in my
neighborhood, are so suited to the apple, that it will grow faster in
them without any care, or if only the ground is broken up once a year,
than it will in many places with any amount of care. The owners of
this tract allow that the soil is excellent for fruit, but they say
that it is so rocky that they have not patience to plow it, and that,
together with the distance, is the reason why it is not cultivated.
There are, or were recently, extensive orchards there standing without
order. Nay, they spring up wild and bear well there in the midst of
pines, birches, maples, and oaks. I am often surprised to see rising
amid these trees the rounded tops of apple trees glowing with red or
yellow fruit, in harmony with the autumnal tints of the forest.
Going up the side of a cliff about the first of November, I saw a
vigorous young apple tree, which, planted by birds or cows, had shot
up amid the rocks and open woods there, and had now much fruit on it,
uninjured by the frosts, when all cultivated apples were gathered. It
was a rank, wild growth, with many green leaves on it still, and made
an impression of thorniness. The fruit was hard and green, but looked
as if it would be palatable in the winter. Some was dangling on the
twigs, but more half buried in the wet leaves under the tree, or
rolled far down the hill amid the rocks. The owner knows nothing of
it. The day was not observed when it first blossomed, nor when it
first bore fruit, unless by the chickadee. There was no dancing on the
green beneath it in its honor, and now there is no hand to pluck its
fruit,--which is only gnawed by squirrels, as I perceive. It has done
double duty,--not only borne this crop, but each twig has grown a foot
into the air. And this is _such_ fruit! bigger than many berries, we
must admit, and carried home will be sound and palatable next spring.
What care I for Iduna's apples so long as I can get these?
When I go by this shrub thus late and hardy, and see its dangling
fruit, I respect the tree, and I am grateful for Nature's bounty, even
though I cannot eat it. Here on this rugged and woody hillside has
grown an apple tree, not planted by man, no relic of a former orchard,
but a natural growth, like the pines and oaks. Most fruits which we
prize and use depend entirely on our care. Corn and grain, potatoes,
peaches, melons, etc. , depend altogether on our planting; but the
apple emulates man's independence and enterprise. It is not simply
carried, as I have said, but, like him, to some extent, it has
migrated to this New World, and is even, here and there, making its
way amid the aboriginal trees; just as the ox and dog and horse
sometimes run wild and maintain themselves.
[Illustration: _Wild Apple Tree_]
Even the sourest and crabbedest apple, growing in the most unfavorable
position, suggests such thoughts as these, it is so noble a fruit.
THE CRAB
Nevertheless, _our_ wild apple is wild only like myself, perchance,
who belong not to the aboriginal race here, but have strayed into the
woods from the cultivated stock. Wilder still, as I have said, there
grows elsewhere in this country a native and aboriginal crab-apple,
_Malus coronaria_, "whose nature has not yet been modified by
cultivation. " It is found from western New York to Minnesota, and
southward. Michaux says that its ordinary height "is fifteen or
eighteen feet, but it is sometimes found twenty-five or thirty feet
high," and that the large ones "exactly resemble the common apple
tree. " "The flowers are white mingled with rose color, and are
collected in corymbs. " They are remarkable for their delicious odor.
The fruit, according to him, is about an inch and a half in diameter,
and is intensely acid. Yet they make fine sweetmeats and also cider of
them. He concludes that "if, on being cultivated, it does not yield
new and palatable varieties, it will at least be celebrated for the
beauty of its flowers, and for the sweetness of its perfume. "
I never saw the crab-apple till May, 1861. I had heard of it through
Michaux, but more modern botanists, so far as I know, have not
treated it as of any peculiar importance.
the main street, they appear like painted screens standing before the
houses; yet many are green. But now, or generally by the seventeenth
of October, when almost all red maples and some white maples are bare,
the large sugar maples also are in their glory, glowing with yellow
and red, and show unexpectedly bright and delicate tints. They are
remarkable for the contrast they often afford of deep blushing red on
one half and green on the other. They become at length dense masses of
rich yellow with a deep scarlet blush, or more than blush, on the
exposed surfaces. They are the brightest trees now in the street.
The large ones on our Common are particularly beautiful. A delicate
but warmer than golden yellow is now the prevailing color, with
scarlet cheeks. Yet, standing on the east side of the Common just
before sundown, when the western light is transmitted through them, I
see that their yellow even, compared with the pale lemon yellow of an
elm close by, amounts to a scarlet, without noticing the bright
scarlet portions. Generally, they are great regular oval masses of
yellow and scarlet. All the sunny warmth of the season, the Indian
summer, seems to be absorbed in their leaves. The lowest and inmost
leaves next the bole are, as usual, of the most delicate yellow and
green, like the complexion of young men brought up in the house. There
is an auction on the Common to-day, but its red flag is hard to be
discerned amid this blaze of color.
Little did the fathers of the town anticipate this brilliant success,
when they caused to be imported from farther in the country some
straight poles with their tops cut off, which they called sugar
maples; and, as I remember, after they were set out, a neighboring
merchant's clerk, by way of jest, planted beans about them. Those
which were then jestingly called bean-poles are to-day far the most
beautiful objects noticeable in our streets. They are worth all and
more than they have cost,--though one of the selectmen, while setting
them out, took the cold which occasioned his death,--if only because
they have filled the open eyes of children with their rich color
unstintedly so many Octobers. We will not ask them to yield us sugar
in the spring, while they afford us so fair a prospect in the autumn.
Wealth indoors may be the inheritance of few, but it is equally
distributed on the Common. All children alike can revel in this golden
harvest.
Surely trees should be set in our streets with a view to their October
splendor, though I doubt whether this is ever considered by the "Tree
Society. " Do you not think it will make some odds to these children
that they were brought up under the maples? Hundreds of eyes are
steadily drinking in this color, and by these teachers even the
truants are caught and educated the moment they step abroad. Indeed,
neither the truant nor the studious is at present taught color in the
schools. These are instead of the bright colors in apothecaries'
shops and city windows. It is a pity that we have no more _red_
maples, and some hickories, in our streets as well. Our paint-box is
very imperfectly filled. Instead of, or beside, supplying such
paint-boxes as we do, we might supply these natural colors to the
young. Where else will they study color under greater advantages? What
School of Design can vie with this? Think how much the eyes of
painters of all kinds, and of manufacturers of cloth and paper, and
paper-stainers, and countless others, are to be educated by these
autumnal colors. The stationer's envelopes may be of very various
tints, yet not so various as those of the leaves of a single tree. If
you want a different shade or tint of a particular color, you have
only to look farther within or without the tree or the wood. These
leaves are not many dipped in one dye, as at the dye-house, but they
are dyed in light of infinitely various degrees of strength and left
to set and dry there.
Shall the names of so many of our colors continue to be derived from
those of obscure foreign localities, as Naples yellow, Prussian blue,
raw Sienna, burnt Umber, Gamboge? (surely the Tyrian purple must have
faded by this time), or from comparatively trivial articles of
commerce,--chocolate, lemon, coffee, cinnamon, claret? (shall we
compare our hickory to a lemon, or a lemon to a hickory? ) or from ores
and oxides which few ever see? Shall we so often, when describing to
our neighbors the color of something we have seen, refer them, not to
some natural object in our neighborhood, but perchance to a bit of
earth fetched from the other side of the planet, which possibly they
may find at the apothecary's, but which probably neither they nor we
ever saw? Have we not an _earth_ under our feet,--aye, and a sky over
our heads? Or is the last _all_ ultramarine? What do we know of
sapphire, amethyst, emerald, ruby, amber, and the like,--most of us
who take these names in vain? Leave these precious words to
cabinet-keepers, virtuosos, and maids-of-honor,--to the Nabobs,
Begums, and Chobdars of Hindostan, or wherever else. I do not see why,
since America and her autumn woods have been discovered, our leaves
should not compete with the precious stones in giving names to colors;
and, indeed, I believe that in course of time the names of some of our
trees and shrubs, as well as flowers, will get into our popular
chromatic nomenclature.
But of much more importance than a knowledge of the names and
distinctions of color is the joy and exhilaration which these colored
leaves excite. Already these brilliant trees throughout the street,
without any more variety, are at least equal to an annual festival and
holiday, or a week of such. These are cheap and innocent gala-days,
celebrated by one and all without the aid of committees or marshals,
such a show as may safely be licensed, not attracting gamblers or
rum-sellers, not requiring any special police to keep the peace. And
poor indeed must be that New England village's October which has not
the maple in its streets. This October festival costs no powder, nor
ringing of bells, but every tree is a living liberty-pole on which a
thousand bright flags are waving.
No wonder that we must have our annual cattle-show, and fall training,
and perhaps cornwallis, our September courts, and the like. Nature
herself holds her annual fair in October, not only in the streets, but
in every hollow and on every hillside. When lately we looked into that
red maple swamp all ablaze, where the trees were clothed in their
vestures of most dazzling tints, did it not suggest a thousand gypsies
beneath,--a race capable of wild delight,--or even the fabled fauns,
satyrs, and wood-nymphs come back to earth? Or was it only a
congregation of wearied woodchoppers, or of proprietors come to
inspect their lots, that we thought of? Or, earlier still, when we
paddled on the river through that fine-grained September air, did
there not appear to be something new going on under the sparkling
surface of the stream, a shaking of props, at least, so that we made
haste in order to be up in time? Did not the rows of yellowing willows
and button-bushes on each side seem like rows of booths, under which,
perhaps, some fluviatile egg-pop equally yellow was effervescing? Did
not all these suggest that man's spirits should rise as high as
Nature's,--should hang out their flag, and the routine of his life be
interrupted by an analogous expression of joy and hilarity?
No annual training or muster of soldiery, no celebration with its
scarfs and banners, could import into the town a hundredth part of the
annual splendor of our October. We have only to set the trees, or let
them stand, and Nature will find the colored drapery,--flags of all
her nations, some of whose private signals hardly the botanist can
read,--while we walk under the triumphal arches of the elms. Leave it
to Nature to appoint the days, whether the same as in neighboring
States or not, and let the clergy read her proclamations, if they can
understand them. Behold what a brilliant drapery is her woodbine flag!
What public-spirited merchant, think you, has contributed this part of
the show? There is no handsomer shingling and paint than this vine, at
present covering a whole side of some houses. I do not believe that
the ivy _never sere_ is comparable to it. No wonder it has been
extensively introduced into London. Let us have a good many maples and
hickories and scarlet oaks, then, I say. Blaze away! Shall that dirty
roll of bunting in the gun-house be all the colors a village can
display? A village is not complete, unless it have these trees to mark
the season in it. They are important, like the town clock. A village
that has them not will not be found to work well. It has a screw
loose, an essential part is wanting. Let us have willows for spring,
elms for summer, maples and walnuts and tupeloes for autumn,
evergreens for winter, and oaks for all seasons. What is a gallery in
a house to a gallery in the streets, which every market-man rides
through, whether he will or not? Of course, there is not a
picture-gallery in the country which would be worth so much to us as
is the western view at sunset under the elms of our main street. They
are the frame to a picture which is daily painted behind them. An
avenue of elms as large as our largest and three miles long would seem
to lead to some admirable place, though only C---- were at the end of
it.
A village needs these innocent stimulants of bright and cheering
prospects to keep off melancholy and superstition. Show me two
villages, one embowered in trees and blazing with all the glories of
October, the other a merely trivial and treeless waste, or with only a
single tree or two for suicides, and I shall be sure that in the
latter will be found the most starved and bigoted religionists and the
most desperate drinkers. Every wash-tub and milk-can and gravestone
will be exposed. The inhabitants will disappear abruptly behind their
barns and houses, like desert Arabs amid their rocks, and I shall look
to see spears in their hands. They will be ready to accept the most
barren and forlorn doctrine,--as that the world is speedily coming to
an end, or has already got to it, or that they themselves are turned
wrong side outward. They will perchance crack their dry joints at one
another and call it a spiritual communication.
But to confine ourselves to the maples. What if we were to take half
as much pains in protecting them as we do in setting them out,--not
stupidly tie our horses to our dahlia stems?
What meant the fathers by establishing this _perfectly living_
institution before the church,--this institution which needs no
repairing nor repainting, which is continually enlarged and repaired
by its growth? Surely they
"Wrought in a sad sincerity;
Themselves from God they could not free;
They _planted_ better than they knew;--
The conscious _trees_ to beauty grew. "
Verily these maples are cheap preachers, permanently settled, which
preach their half-century, and century, aye, and century-and-a-half
sermons, with constantly increasing unction and influence, ministering
to many generations of men; and the least we can do is to supply them
with suitable colleagues as they grow infirm.
THE SCARLET OAK
Belonging to a genus which is remarkable for the beautiful form of its
leaves, I suspect that some scarlet oak leaves surpass those of all
other oaks in the rich and wild beauty of their outlines. I judge from
an acquaintance with twelve species, and from drawings which I have
seen of many others.
Stand under this tree and see how finely its leaves are cut against
the sky,--as it were, only a few sharp points extending from a midrib.
They look like double, treble, or quadruple crosses. They are far more
ethereal than the less deeply scalloped oak leaves. They have so
little leafy _terra firma_ that they appear melting away in the light,
and scarcely obstruct our view. The leaves of very young plants are,
like those of full-grown oaks of other species, more entire, simple,
and lumpish in their outlines, but these, raised high on old trees,
have solved the leafy problem. Lifted higher and higher, and
sublimated more and more, putting off some earthiness and cultivating
more intimacy with the light each year, they have at length the least
possible amount of earthy matter, and the greatest spread and grasp of
skyey influences. There they dance, arm in arm with the
light,--tripping it on fantastic points, fit partners in those aerial
halls. So intimately mingled are they with it, that, what with their
slenderness and their glossy surfaces, you can hardly tell at last
what in the dance is leaf and what is light. And when no zephyr stirs,
they are at most but a rich tracery to the forest windows.
I am again struck with their beauty, when, a month later, they thickly
strew the ground in the woods, piled one upon another under my feet.
They are then brown above, but purple beneath. With their narrow lobes
and their bold, deep scallops reaching almost to the middle, they
suggest that the material must be cheap, or else there has been a
lavish expense in their creation, as if so much had been cut out. Or
else they seem to us the remnants of the stuff out of which leaves
have been cut with a die. Indeed, when they lie thus one upon another,
they remind me of a pile of scrap-tin.
Or bring one home, and study it closely at your leisure, by the
fireside. It is a type, not from any Oxford font, not in the Basque
nor the arrow-headed character, not found on the Rosetta Stone, but
destined to be copied in sculpture one day, if they ever get to
whittling stone here. What a wild and pleasing outline, a combination
of graceful curves and angles! The eye rests with equal delight on
what is not leaf and on what is leaf,--on the broad, free, open
sinuses, and on the long, sharp, bristle-pointed lobes. A simple oval
outline would include it all, if you connected the points of the leaf;
but how much richer is it than that, with its half-dozen deep
scallops, in which the eye and thought of the beholder are embayed! If
I were a drawing-master, I would set my pupils to copying these
leaves, that they might learn to draw firmly and gracefully.
Regarded as water, it is like a pond with half a dozen broad rounded
promontories extending nearly to its middle, half from each side,
while its watery bays extend far inland, like sharp friths, at each of
whose heads several fine streams empty in,--almost a leafy
archipelago.
But it oftener suggests land, and, as Dionysius and Pliny compared the
form of the Morea to that of the leaf of the Oriental plane tree, so
this leaf reminds me of some fair wild island in the ocean, whose
extensive coast, alternate rounded bays with smooth strands, and
sharp-pointed rocky capes, mark it as fitted for the habitation of
man, and destined to become a centre of civilization at last. To the
sailor's eye, it is a much indented shore. Is it not, in fact, a shore
to the aerial ocean, on which the windy surf beats? At sight of this
leaf we are all mariners,--if not vikings, buccaneers, and
filibusters. Both our love of repose and our spirit of adventure are
addressed. In our most casual glance, perchance, we think that if we
succeed in doubling those sharp capes we shall find deep, smooth, and
secure havens in the ample bays. How different from the white oak
leaf, with its rounded headlands, on which no lighthouse need be
placed! That is an England, with its long civil history, that may be
read. This is some still unsettled New-found Island or Celebes. Shall
we go and be rajahs there?
By the twenty-sixth of October the large scarlet oaks are in their
prime, when other oaks are usually withered. They have been kindling
their fires for a week past, and now generally burst into a blaze.
This alone of _our_ indigenous deciduous trees (excepting the
dogwood, of which I do not know half a dozen, and they are but large
bushes) is now in its glory. The two aspens and the sugar maple come
nearest to it in date, but they have lost the greater part of their
leaves. Of evergreens, only the pitch pine is still commonly bright.
But it requires a particular alertness, if not devotion to these
phenomena, to appreciate the wide-spread, but late and unexpected
glory of the scarlet oaks. I do not speak here of the small trees and
shrubs, which are commonly observed, and which are now withered, but
of the large trees. Most go in and shut their doors, thinking that
bleak and colorless November has already come, when some of the most
brilliant and memorable colors are not yet lit.
This very perfect and vigorous one, about forty feet high, standing in
an open pasture, which was quite glossy green on the twelfth, is now,
the twenty-sixth, completely changed to bright dark-scarlet,--every
leaf, between you and the sun, as if it had been dipped into a scarlet
dye. The whole tree is much like a heart in form, as well as color.
Was not this worth waiting for? Little did you think, ten days ago,
that that cold green tree would assume such color as this. Its leaves
are still firmly attached, while those of other trees are falling
around it. It seems to say: "I am the last to blush, but I blush
deeper than any of ye. I bring up the rear in my red coat. We scarlet
ones, alone of oaks, have not given up the fight. "
The sap is now, and even far into November, frequently flowing fast in
these trees, as in maples in the spring; and apparently their bright
tints, now that most other oaks are withered, are connected with this
phenomenon. They are full of life. It has a pleasantly astringent,
acorn-like taste, this strong oak wine, as I find on tapping them with
my knife.
Looking across this woodland valley, a quarter of a mile wide, how
rich those scarlet oaks embosomed in pines, their bright red branches
intimately intermingled with them! They have their full effect there.
The pine boughs are the green calyx to their red petals. Or, as we go
along a road in the woods, the sun striking endwise through it, and
lighting up the red tents of the oaks, which on each side are mingled
with the liquid green of the pines, makes a very gorgeous scene.
Indeed, without the evergreens for contrast, the autumnal tints would
lose much of their effect.
The scarlet oak asks a clear sky and the brightness of late October
days. These bring out its colors. If the sun goes into a cloud they
become comparatively indistinct. As I sit on a cliff in the southwest
part of our town, the sun is now getting low, and the woods in
Lincoln, south and east of me, are lit up by its more level rays; and
in the scarlet oaks, scattered so equally over the forest, there is
brought out a more brilliant redness than I had believed was in them.
Every tree of this species which is visible in those directions, even
to the horizon, now stands out distinctly red. Some great ones lift
their red backs high above the woods, in the next town, like huge
roses with a myriad of fine petals; and some more slender ones, in a
small grove of white pines on Pine Hill in the east, on the very verge
of the horizon, alternating with the pines on the edge of the grove,
and shouldering them with their red coats, look like soldiers in red
amid hunters in green. This time it is Lincoln green, too. Till the
sun got low, I did not believe that there were so many redcoats in the
forest army. Theirs is an intense, burning red, which would lose some
of its strength, methinks, with every step you might take toward them;
for the shade that lurks amid their foliage does not report itself at
this distance, and they are unanimously red. The focus of their
reflected color is in the atmosphere far on this side. Every such tree
becomes a nucleus of red, as it were, where, with the declining sun,
that color grows and glows. It is partly borrowed fire, gathering
strength from the sun on its way to your eye. It has only some
comparatively dull red leaves for a rallying-point, or kindling-stuff,
to start it, and it becomes an intense scarlet or red mist, or fire,
which finds fuel for itself in the very atmosphere. So vivacious is
redness. The very rails reflect a rosy light at this hour and season.
You see a redder tree than exists.
If you wish to count the scarlet oaks, do it now. In a clear day stand
thus on a hilltop in the woods, when the sun is an hour high, and
every one within range of your vision, excepting in the west, will be
revealed. You might live to the age of Methuselah and never find a
tithe of them, otherwise. Yet sometimes even in a dark day I have
thought them as bright as I ever saw them. Looking westward, their
colors are lost in a blaze of light; but in other directions the whole
forest is a flower-garden, in which these late roses burn, alternating
with green, while the so-called "gardeners," walking here and there,
perchance, beneath, with spade and water-pot, see only a few little
asters amid withered leaves.
These are _my_ China-asters, _my_ late garden-flowers. It costs me
nothing for a gardener. The falling leaves, all over the forest, are
protecting the roots of my plants. Only look at what is to be seen,
and you will have garden enough, without deepening the soil in your
yard. We have only to elevate our view a little, to see the whole
forest as a garden. The blossoming of the scarlet oak,--the
forest-flower, surpassing all in splendor (at least since the maple)!
I do not know but they interest me more than the maples, they are so
widely and equally dispersed throughout the forest; they are so hardy,
a nobler tree on the whole; our chief November flower, abiding the
approach of winter with us, imparting warmth to early November
prospects. It is remarkable that the latest bright color that is
general should be this deep, dark scarlet and red, the intensest of
colors. The ripest fruit of the year; like the cheek of a hard, glossy
red apple, from the cold Isle of Orleans, which will not be mellow for
eating till next spring! When I rise to a hilltop, a thousand of these
great oak roses, distributed on every side, as far as the horizon! I
admire them four or five miles off! This my unfailing prospect for a
fortnight past! This late forest-flower surpasses all that spring or
summer could do. Their colors were but rare and dainty specks
comparatively (created for the near-sighted, who walk amid the
humblest herbs and underwoods), and made no impression on a distant
eye. Now it is an extended forest or a mountain-side, through or along
which we journey from day to day, that bursts into bloom.
Comparatively, our gardening is on a petty scale,--the gardener still
nursing a few asters amid dead weeds, ignorant of the gigantic asters
and roses which, as it were, overshadow him, and ask for none of his
care. It is like a little red paint ground on a saucer, and held up
against the sunset sky. Why not take more elevated and broader views,
walk in the great garden; not skulk in a little "debauched" nook of
it? consider the beauty of the forest, and not merely of a few
impounded herbs?
Let your walks now be a little more adventurous; ascend the hills. If,
about the last of October, you ascend any hill in the outskirts of our
town, and probably of yours, and look over the forest, you may
see--well, what I have endeavored to describe. All this you surely
_will_ see, and much more, if you are prepared to see it,--if you
_look_ for it. Otherwise, regular and universal as this phenomenon is,
whether you stand on the hilltop or in the hollow, you will think for
threescore years and ten that all the wood is, at this season, sere
and brown. Objects are concealed from our view, not so much because
they are out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not
bring our minds and eyes to bear on them; for there is no power to see
in the eye itself, any more than in any other jelly. We do not realize
how far and widely, or how near and narrowly, we are to look. The
greater part of the phenomena of Nature are for this reason concealed
from us all our lives. The gardener sees only the gardener's garden.
Here, too, as in political economy, the supply answers to the demand.
Nature does not cast pearls before swine. There is just as much
beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to
appreciate,--not a grain more. The actual objects which one man will
see from a particular hilltop are just as different from those which
another will see as the beholders are different. The scarlet oak must,
in a sense, be in your eye when you go forth. We cannot see anything
until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our
heads,--and then we can hardly see anything else. In my botanical
rambles I find that, first, the idea, or image, of a plant occupies my
thoughts, though it may seem very foreign to this locality,--no nearer
than Hudson's Bay,--and for some weeks or months I go thinking of it,
and expecting it, unconsciously, and at length I surely see it. This
is the history of my finding a score or more of rare plants which I
could name. A man sees only what concerns him. A botanist absorbed in
the study of grasses does not distinguish the grandest pasture oaks.
He, as it were, tramples down oaks unwittingly in his walk, or at most
sees only their shadows. I have found that it required a different
intention of the eye, in the same locality, to see different plants,
even when they were closely allied, as _Juncaceae_ and _Gramineae_:
when I was looking for the former, I did not see the latter in the
midst of them. How much more, then, it requires different intentions
of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of
knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at
objects!
Take a New England selectman, and set him on the highest of our hills,
and tell him to look,--sharpening his sight to the utmost, and putting
on the glasses that suit him best (aye, using a spy-glass, if he
likes),--and make a full report. What, probably, will he _spy_? --what
will he _select_ to look at? Of course, he will see a Brocken spectre
of himself. He will see several meeting-houses, at least, and,
perhaps, that somebody ought to be assessed higher than he is, since
he has so handsome a wood-lot. Now take Julius Caesar, or Emanuel
Swedenborg, or a Fiji-Islander, and set him up there. Or suppose all
together, and let them compare notes afterward. Will it appear that
they have enjoyed the same prospect? What they will see will be as
different as Rome was from heaven or hell, or the last from the Fiji
Islands. For aught we know, as strange a man as any of these is always
at our elbow.
Why, it takes a sharpshooter to bring down even such trivial game as
snipes and woodcocks; he must take very particular aim, and know what
he is aiming at. He would stand a very small chance, if he fired at
random into the sky, being told that snipes were flying there. And so
is it with him that shoots at beauty; though he wait till the sky
falls, he will not bag any, if he does not already know its seasons
and haunts, and the color of its wing,--if he has not dreamed of it,
so that he can _anticipate_ it; then, indeed, he flushes it at every
step, shoots double and on the wing, with both barrels, even in
corn-fields. The sportsman trains himself, dresses, and watches
unweariedly, and loads and primes for his particular game. He prays
for it, and offers sacrifices, and so he gets it. After due and long
preparation, schooling his eye and hand, dreaming awake and asleep,
with gun and paddle and boat, he goes out after meadow-hens, which
most of his townsmen never saw nor dreamed of, and paddles for miles
against a head wind, and wades in water up to his knees, being out all
day without his dinner, and _therefore_ he gets them. He had them
half-way into his bag when he started, and has only to shove them
down. The true sportsman can shoot you almost any of his game from his
windows: what else has he windows or eyes for? It comes and perches at
last on the barrel of his gun; but the rest of the world never see it
_with the feathers on_. The geese fly exactly under his zenith, and
honk when they get there, and he will keep himself supplied by firing
up his chimney; twenty musquash have the refusal of each one of his
traps before it is empty. If he lives, and his game spirit increases,
heaven and earth shall fail him sooner than game; and when he dies, he
will go to more extensive and, perchance, happier hunting-grounds. The
fisherman, too, dreams of fish, sees a bobbing cork in his dreams,
till he can almost catch them in his sink-spout. I knew a girl who,
being sent to pick huckleberries, picked wild gooseberries by the
quart, where no one else knew that there were any, because she was
accustomed to pick them up-country where she came from. The astronomer
knows where to go star-gathering, and sees one clearly in his mind
before any have seen it with a glass. The hen scratches and finds her
food right under where she stands; but such is not the way with the
hawk.
* * * * *
These bright leaves which I have mentioned are not the exception, but
the rule; for I believe that all leaves, even grasses and mosses,
acquire brighter colors just before their fall. When you come to
observe faithfully the changes of each humblest plant, you find that
each has, sooner or later, its peculiar autumnal tint; and if you
undertake to make a complete list of the bright tints, it will be
nearly as long as a catalogue of the plants in your vicinity.
WILD APPLES
THE HISTORY OF THE APPLE TREE
It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is
connected with that of man. The geologist tells us that the order of
the _Rosaceae_, which includes the apple, also the true grasses, and
the _Labiatae_, or mints, were introduced only a short time previous
to the appearance of man on the globe.
It appears that apples made a part of the food of that unknown
primitive people whose traces have lately been found at the bottom of
the Swiss lakes, supposed to be older than the foundation of Rome, so
old that they had no metallic implements. An entire black and
shriveled crab-apple has been recovered from their stores.
Tacitus says of the ancient Germans that they satisfied their hunger
with wild apples (_agrestia poma_), among other things.
Niebuhr observes that "the words for a house, a field, a plow,
plowing, wine, oil, milk, sheep, apples, and others relating to
agriculture and the gentler way of life, agree in Latin and Greek,
while the Latin words for all objects pertaining to war or the chase
are utterly alien from the Greek. " Thus the apple tree may be
considered a symbol of peace no less than the olive.
The apple was early so important, and generally distributed, that its
name traced to its root in many languages signifies fruit in general.
? ? ? ? ? , in Greek, means an apple, also the fruit of other trees, also a
sheep and any cattle, and finally riches in general.
The apple tree has been celebrated by the Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, and
Scandinavians. Some have thought that the first human pair were
tempted by its fruit. Goddesses are fabled to have contended for it,
dragons were set to watch it, and heroes were employed to pluck it.
The tree is mentioned in at least three places in the Old Testament,
and its fruit in two or three more. Solomon sings, "As the apple-tree
among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. " And
again, "Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples. " The noblest
part of man's noblest feature is named from this fruit, "the apple of
the eye. "
The apple tree is also mentioned by Homer and Herodotus. Ulysses saw
in the glorious garden of Alcinous "pears and pomegranates, and apple
trees bearing beautiful fruit" (? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ). And according
to Homer, apples were among the fruits which Tantalus could not pluck,
the wind ever blowing their boughs away from him. Theophrastus knew and
described the apple tree as a botanist.
According to the Prose Edda, "Iduna keeps in a box the apples which
the gods, when they feel old age approaching, have only to taste of to
become young again. It is in this manner that they will be kept in
renovated youth until Ragnarok" (or the destruction of the gods).
I learn from Loudon that "the ancient Welsh bards were rewarded for
excelling in song by the token of the apple-spray;" and "in the
Highlands of Scotland the apple-tree is the badge of the clan Lamont. "
The apple tree (_Pyrus malus_) belongs chiefly to the northern
temperate zone. Loudon says that "it grows spontaneously in every part
of Europe except the frigid zone, and throughout Western Asia, China,
and Japan. " We have also two or three varieties of the apple
indigenous in North America. The cultivated apple tree was first
introduced into this country by the earliest settlers, and is thought
to do as well or better here than anywhere else. Probably some of the
varieties which are now cultivated were first introduced into Britain
by the Romans.
Pliny, adopting the distinction of Theophrastus, says, "Of trees there
are some which are altogether wild (_sylvestres_), some more civilized
(_urbaniores_). " Theophrastus includes the apple among the last; and,
indeed, it is in this sense the most civilized of all trees. It is as
harmless as a dove, as beautiful as a rose, and as valuable as flocks
and herds. It has been longer cultivated than any other, and so is
more humanized; and who knows but, like the dog, it will at length be
no longer traceable to its wild original? It migrates with man, like
the dog and horse and cow: first, perchance, from Greece to Italy,
thence to England, thence to America; and our Western emigrant is
still marching steadily toward the setting sun with the seeds of the
apple in his pocket, or perhaps a few young trees strapped to his
load. At least a million apple trees are thus set farther westward
this year than any cultivated ones grew last year. Consider how the
Blossom Week, like the Sabbath, is thus annually spreading over the
prairies; for when man migrates, he carries with him not only his
birds, quadrupeds, insects, vegetables, and his very sward, but his
orchard also.
The leaves and tender twigs are an agreeable food to many domestic
animals, as the cow, horse, sheep, and goat; and the fruit is sought
after by the first, as well as by the hog. Thus there appears to have
existed a natural alliance between these animals and this tree from
the first. "The fruit of the crab in the forests of France" is said to
be "a great resource for the wild boar. "
Not only the Indian, but many indigenous insects, birds, and
quadrupeds, welcomed the apple tree to these shores. The tent
caterpillar saddled her eggs on the very first twig that was formed,
and it has since shared her affections with the wild cherry; and the
canker-worm also in a measure abandoned the elm to feed on it. As it
grew apace, the bluebird, robin, cherry-bird, kingbird, and many more
came with haste and built their nests and warbled in its boughs, and
so became orchard-birds, and multiplied more than ever. It was an era
in the history of their race. The downy woodpecker found such a savory
morsel under its bark that he perforated it in a ring quite round the
tree, before he left it,--a thing which he had never done before, to
my knowledge. It did not take the partridge long to find out how sweet
its buds were, and every winter eve she flew, and still flies, from
the wood, to pluck them, much to the farmer's sorrow. The rabbit, too,
was not slow to learn the taste of its twigs and bark; and when the
fruit was ripe, the squirrel half rolled, half carried it to his hole;
and even the musquash crept up the bank from the brook at evening, and
greedily devoured it, until he had worn a path in the grass there; and
when it was frozen and thawed, the crow and the jay were glad to taste
it occasionally. The owl crept into the first apple tree that became
hollow, and fairly hooted with delight, finding it just the place for
him; so, settling down into it, he has remained there ever since.
My theme being the Wild Apple, I will merely glance at some of the
seasons in the annual growth of the cultivated apple, and pass on to
my special province.
The flowers of the apple are perhaps the most beautiful of any tree's,
so copious and so delicious to both sight and scent. The walker is
frequently tempted to turn and linger near some more than usually
handsome one, whose blossoms are two-thirds expanded. How superior it
is in these respects to the pear, whose blossoms are neither colored
nor fragrant!
By the middle of July, green apples are so large as to remind us of
coddling, and of the autumn. The sward is commonly strewed with little
ones which fall stillborn, as it were,--Nature thus thinning them for
us. The Roman writer Palladius said, "If apples are inclined to fall
before their time, a stone placed in a split root will retain them. "
Some such notion, still surviving, may account for some of the stones
which we see placed, to be overgrown, in the forks of trees. They have
a saying in Suffolk, England,--
"At Michaelmas time, or a little before,
Half an apple goes to the core. "
Early apples begin to be ripe about the first of August; but I think
that none of them are so good to eat as some to smell. One is worth
more to scent your handkerchief with than any perfume which they sell
in the shops. The fragrance of some fruits is not to be forgotten,
along with that of flowers. Some gnarly apple which I pick up in the
road reminds me by its fragrance of all the wealth of Pomona,--carrying
me forward to those days when they will be collected in golden and
ruddy heaps in the orchards and about the cider-mills.
A week or two later, as you are going by orchards or gardens,
especially in the evenings, you pass through a little region possessed
by the fragrance of ripe apples, and thus enjoy them without price,
and without robbing anybody.
There is thus about all natural products a certain volatile and
ethereal quality which represents their highest value, and which
cannot be vulgarized, or bought and sold. No mortal has ever enjoyed
the perfect flavor of any fruit, and only the godlike among men begin
to taste its ambrosial qualities. For nectar and ambrosia are only
those fine flavors of every earthly fruit which our coarse palates
fail to perceive,--just as we occupy the heaven of the gods without
knowing it. When I see a particularly mean man carrying a load of fair
and fragrant early apples to market, I seem to see a contest going on
between him and his horse, on the one side, and the apples on the
other, and, to my mind, the apples always gain it. Pliny says that
apples are the heaviest of all things, and that the oxen begin to
sweat at the mere sight of a load of them. Our driver begins to lose
his load the moment he tries to transport them to where they do not
belong, that is, to any but the most beautiful. Though he gets out
from time to time, and feels of them, and thinks they are all there, I
see the stream of their evanescent and celestial qualities going to
heaven from his cart, while the pulp and skin and core only are going
to market. They are not apples, but pomace. Are not these still
Iduna's apples, the taste of which keeps the gods forever young? and
think you that they will let Loki or Thjassi carry them off to
Jotunheim, while they grow wrinkled and gray? No, for Ragnarok, or the
destruction of the gods, is not yet.
There is another thinning of the fruit, commonly near the end of
August or in September, when the ground is strewn with windfalls; and
this happens especially when high winds occur after rain. In some
orchards you may see fully three quarters of the whole crop on the
ground, lying in a circular form beneath the trees, yet hard and
green, or, if it is a hillside, rolled far down the hill. However, it
is an ill wind that blows nobody any good. All the country over,
people are busy picking up the windfalls, and this will make them
cheap for early apple pies.
In October, the leaves falling, the apples are more distinct on the
trees. I saw one year in a neighboring town some trees fuller of fruit
than I remember to have ever seen before, small yellow apples hanging
over the road. The branches were gracefully drooping with their
weight, like a barberry bush, so that the whole tree acquired a new
character. Even the topmost branches, instead of standing erect,
spread and drooped in all directions; and there were so many poles
supporting the lower ones that they looked like pictures of banyan
trees. As an old English manuscript says, "The mo appelen the tree
bereth the more sche boweth to the folk. "
Surely the apple is the noblest of fruits. Let the most beautiful or
the swiftest have it. That should be the "going" price of apples.
Between the 5th and 20th of October I see the barrels lie under the
trees. And perhaps I talk with one who is selecting some choice
barrels to fulfill an order. He turns a specked one over many times
before he leaves it out. If I were to tell what is passing in my mind,
I should say that every one was specked which he had handled; for he
rubs off all the bloom, and those fugacious ethereal qualities leave
it. Cool evenings prompt the farmers to make haste, and at length I
see only the ladders here and there left leaning against the trees.
It would be well, if we accepted these gifts with more joy and
gratitude, and did not think it enough simply to put a fresh load of
compost about the tree. Some old English customs are suggestive at
least. I find them described chiefly in Brand's "Popular Antiquities. "
It appears that "on Christmas Eve the farmers and their men in
Devonshire take a large bowl of cider, with a toast in it, and
carrying it in state to the orchard, they salute the apple-trees with
much ceremony, in order to make them bear well the next season. " This
salutation consists in "throwing some of the cider about the roots of
the tree, placing bits of the toast on the branches," and then,
"encircling one of the best bearing trees in the orchard, they drink
the following toast three several times:--
'Here's to thee, old apple tree,
Whence thou mayst bud, and whence thou mayst blow,
And whence thou mayst bear apples enow!
Hats-full! caps-full!
Bushel, bushel, sacks-full!
And my pockets full, too! Hurra! '"
Also what was called "apple-howling" used to be practiced in various
counties of England on New Year's Eve. A troop of boys visited the
different orchards, and, encircling the apple trees, repeated the
following words:--
"Stand fast, root! bear well, top!
Pray God send us a good howling crop:
Every twig, apples big;
Every bough, apples enow! "
"They then shout in chorus, one of the boys accompanying them on a
cow's horn. During this ceremony they rap the trees with their
sticks. " This is called "wassailing" the trees, and is thought by some
to be "a relic of the heathen sacrifice to Pomona. "
Herrick sings,--
"Wassaile the trees that they may beare
You many a plum and many a peare;
For more or less fruits they will bring
As you so give them wassailing. "
Our poets have as yet a better right to sing of cider than of wine;
but it behooves them to sing better than English Phillips did, else
they will do no credit to their Muse.
THE WILD APPLE
So much for the more civilized apple trees (_urbaniores_, as Pliny
calls them). I love better to go through the old orchards of ungrafted
apple trees, at what ever season of the year,--so irregularly planted:
sometimes two trees standing close together; and the rows so devious
that you would think that they not only had grown while the owner was
sleeping, but had been set out by him in a somnambulic state. The rows
of grafted fruit will never tempt me to wander amid them like these.
But I now, alas, speak rather from memory than from any recent
experience, such ravages have been made!
Some soils, like a rocky tract called the Easterbrooks Country in my
neighborhood, are so suited to the apple, that it will grow faster in
them without any care, or if only the ground is broken up once a year,
than it will in many places with any amount of care. The owners of
this tract allow that the soil is excellent for fruit, but they say
that it is so rocky that they have not patience to plow it, and that,
together with the distance, is the reason why it is not cultivated.
There are, or were recently, extensive orchards there standing without
order. Nay, they spring up wild and bear well there in the midst of
pines, birches, maples, and oaks. I am often surprised to see rising
amid these trees the rounded tops of apple trees glowing with red or
yellow fruit, in harmony with the autumnal tints of the forest.
Going up the side of a cliff about the first of November, I saw a
vigorous young apple tree, which, planted by birds or cows, had shot
up amid the rocks and open woods there, and had now much fruit on it,
uninjured by the frosts, when all cultivated apples were gathered. It
was a rank, wild growth, with many green leaves on it still, and made
an impression of thorniness. The fruit was hard and green, but looked
as if it would be palatable in the winter. Some was dangling on the
twigs, but more half buried in the wet leaves under the tree, or
rolled far down the hill amid the rocks. The owner knows nothing of
it. The day was not observed when it first blossomed, nor when it
first bore fruit, unless by the chickadee. There was no dancing on the
green beneath it in its honor, and now there is no hand to pluck its
fruit,--which is only gnawed by squirrels, as I perceive. It has done
double duty,--not only borne this crop, but each twig has grown a foot
into the air. And this is _such_ fruit! bigger than many berries, we
must admit, and carried home will be sound and palatable next spring.
What care I for Iduna's apples so long as I can get these?
When I go by this shrub thus late and hardy, and see its dangling
fruit, I respect the tree, and I am grateful for Nature's bounty, even
though I cannot eat it. Here on this rugged and woody hillside has
grown an apple tree, not planted by man, no relic of a former orchard,
but a natural growth, like the pines and oaks. Most fruits which we
prize and use depend entirely on our care. Corn and grain, potatoes,
peaches, melons, etc. , depend altogether on our planting; but the
apple emulates man's independence and enterprise. It is not simply
carried, as I have said, but, like him, to some extent, it has
migrated to this New World, and is even, here and there, making its
way amid the aboriginal trees; just as the ox and dog and horse
sometimes run wild and maintain themselves.
[Illustration: _Wild Apple Tree_]
Even the sourest and crabbedest apple, growing in the most unfavorable
position, suggests such thoughts as these, it is so noble a fruit.
THE CRAB
Nevertheless, _our_ wild apple is wild only like myself, perchance,
who belong not to the aboriginal race here, but have strayed into the
woods from the cultivated stock. Wilder still, as I have said, there
grows elsewhere in this country a native and aboriginal crab-apple,
_Malus coronaria_, "whose nature has not yet been modified by
cultivation. " It is found from western New York to Minnesota, and
southward. Michaux says that its ordinary height "is fifteen or
eighteen feet, but it is sometimes found twenty-five or thirty feet
high," and that the large ones "exactly resemble the common apple
tree. " "The flowers are white mingled with rose color, and are
collected in corymbs. " They are remarkable for their delicious odor.
The fruit, according to him, is about an inch and a half in diameter,
and is intensely acid. Yet they make fine sweetmeats and also cider of
them. He concludes that "if, on being cultivated, it does not yield
new and palatable varieties, it will at least be celebrated for the
beauty of its flowers, and for the sweetness of its perfume. "
I never saw the crab-apple till May, 1861. I had heard of it through
Michaux, but more modern botanists, so far as I know, have not
treated it as of any peculiar importance.
