" They are
remarkable
for their delicious odor.
Thoreau - Excursions and Poems
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. Thus it was a half-fabulous
tree to me. I contemplated a pilgrimage to the "Glades," a portion of
Pennsylvania where it was said to grow to perfection. I thought of
sending to a nursery for it, but doubted if they had it, or would
distinguish it from European varieties. At last I had occasion to go
to Minnesota, and on entering Michigan I began to notice from the cars
a tree with handsome rose-colored flowers. At first I thought it some
variety of thorn; but it was not long before the truth flashed on me,
that this was my long-sought crab-apple. It was the prevailing
flowering shrub or tree to be seen from the cars at that season of the
year,--about the middle of May. But the cars never stopped before one,
and so I was launched on the bosom of the Mississippi without having
touched one, experiencing the fate of Tantalus. On arriving at St.
Anthony's Falls, I was sorry to be told that I was too far north for
the crab-apple. Nevertheless I succeeded in finding it about eight
miles west of the Falls; touched it and smelled it, and secured a
lingering corymb of flowers for my herbarium. This must have been near
its northern limit.
HOW THE WILD APPLE GROWS
But though these are indigenous, like the Indians, I doubt whether
they are any hardier than those backwoodsmen among the apple trees,
which, though descended from cultivated stocks, plant themselves in
distant fields and forests, where the soil is favorable to them. I
know of no trees which have more difficulties to contend with, and
which more sturdily resist their foes. These are the ones whose story
we have to tell. It oftentimes reads thus:--
Near the beginning of May, we notice little thickets of apple trees
just springing up in the pastures where cattle have been,--as the
rocky ones of our Easterbrooks Country, or the top of Nobscot Hill, in
Sudbury. One or two of these, perhaps, survive the drought and other
accidents,--their very birthplace defending them against the
encroaching grass and some other dangers, at first.
In two years' time 't had thus
Reached the level of the rocks,
Admired the stretching world,
Nor feared the wandering flocks.
But at this tender age
Its sufferings began:
There came a browsing ox
And cut it down a span.
This time, perhaps, the ox does not notice it amid the grass; but the
next year, when it has grown more stout, he recognizes it for a
fellow-emigrant from the old country, the flavor of whose leaves and
twigs he well knows; and though at first he pauses to welcome it, and
express his surprise, and gets for answer, "The same cause that
brought you here brought me," he nevertheless browses it again,
reflecting, it may be, that he has some title to it.
Thus cut down annually, it does not despair; but, putting forth two
short twigs for every one cut off, it spreads out low along the ground
in the hollows or between the rocks, growing more stout and scrubby,
until it forms, not a tree as yet, but a little pyramidal, stiff,
twiggy mass, almost as solid and impenetrable as a rock. Some of the
densest and most impenetrable clumps of bushes that I have ever seen,
as well on account of the closeness and stubbornness of their branches
as of their thorns, have been these wild apple scrubs. They are more
like the scrubby fir and black spruce on which you stand, and
sometimes walk, on the tops of mountains, where cold is the demon they
contend with, than anything else. No wonder they are prompted to grow
thorns at last, to defend themselves against such foes. In their
thorniness, however, there is no malice, only some malic acid.
The rocky pastures of the tract I have referred to--for they maintain
their ground best in a rocky field--are thickly sprinkled with these
little tufts, reminding you often of some rigid gray mosses or
lichens, and you see thousands of little trees just springing up
between them, with the seed still attached to them.
Being regularly clipped all around each year by the cows, as a hedge
with shears, they are often of a perfect conical or pyramidal form,
from one to four feet high, and more or less sharp, as if trimmed by
the gardener's art. In the pastures on Nobscot Hill and its spurs,
they make fine dark shadows when the sun is low. They are also an
excellent covert from hawks for many small birds that roost and build
in them. Whole flocks perch in them at night, and I have seen three
robins' nests in one which was six feet in diameter.
No doubt many of these are already old trees, if you reckon from the
day they were planted, but infants still when you consider their
development and the long life before them. I counted the annual rings
of some which were just one foot high, and as wide as high, and found
that they were about twelve years old, but quite sound and thrifty!
They were so low that they were unnoticed by the walker, while many of
their contemporaries from the nurseries were already bearing
considerable crops. But what you gain in time is perhaps in this case,
too, lost in power,--that is, in the vigor of the tree. This is their
pyramidal state.
The cows continue to browse them thus for twenty years or more,
keeping them down and compelling them to spread, until at last they
are so broad that they become their own fence, when some interior
shoot, which their foes cannot reach, darts upward with joy: for it
has not forgotten its high calling, and bears its own peculiar fruit
in triumph.
Such are the tactics by which it finally defeats its bovine foes. Now,
if you have watched the progress of a particular shrub, you will see
that it is no longer a simple pyramid or cone, but that out of its
apex there rises a sprig or two, growing more lustily perchance than
an orchard-tree, since the plant now devotes the whole of its
repressed energy to these upright parts. In a short time these become
a small tree, an inverted pyramid resting on the apex of the other, so
that the whole has now the form of a vast hour-glass. The spreading
bottom, having served its purpose, finally disappears, and the
generous tree permits the now harmless cows to come in and stand in
its shade, and rub against and redden its trunk, which has grown in
spite of them, and even to taste a part of its fruit, and so disperse
the seed.
Thus the cows create their own shade and food; and the tree, its
hour-glass being inverted, lives a second life, as it were.
It is an important question with some nowadays, whether you should
trim young apple trees as high as your nose or as high as your eyes.
The ox trims them up as high as he can reach, and that is about the
right height, I think.
In spite of wandering kine, and other adverse circumstances, that
despised shrub, valued only by small birds as a covert and shelter
from hawks, has its blossom week at last, and in course of time its
harvest, sincere, though small.
By the end of some October, when its leaves have fallen, I frequently
see such a central sprig, whose progress I have watched, when I
thought it had forgotten its destiny, as I had, bearing its first crop
of small green or yellow or rosy fruit, which the cows cannot get at
over the bushy and thorny hedge which surrounds it, and I make haste
to taste the new and undescribed variety. We have all heard of the
numerous varieties of fruit invented by Van Mons and Knight. This is
the system of Van Cow, and she has invented far more and more
memorable varieties than both of them.
Through what hardships it may attain to bear a sweet fruit! Though
somewhat small, it may prove equal, if not superior, in flavor to that
which has grown in a garden,--will perchance be all the sweeter and
more palatable for the very difficulties it has had to contend with.
Who knows but this chance wild fruit, planted by a cow or a bird on
some remote and rocky hillside, where it is as yet unobserved by man,
may be the choicest of all its kind, and foreign potentates shall hear
of it, and royal societies seek to propagate it, though the virtues of
the perhaps truly crabbed owner of the soil may never be heard of,--at
least, beyond the limits of his village? It was thus the Porter and
the Baldwin grew.
Every wild apple shrub excites our expectation thus, somewhat as every
wild child. It is, perhaps, a prince in disguise. What a lesson to
man! So are human beings, referred to the highest standard, the
celestial fruit which they suggest and aspire to bear, browsed on by
fate; and only the most persistent and strongest genius defends itself
and prevails, sends a tender scion upward at last, and drops its
perfect fruit on the ungrateful earth. Poets and philosophers and
statesmen thus spring up in the country pastures, and outlast the
hosts of unoriginal men.
Such is always the pursuit of knowledge. The celestial fruits, the
golden apples of the Hesperides, are ever guarded by a hundred-headed
dragon which never sleeps, so that it is an Herculean labor to pluck
them.
This is one, and the most remarkable way in which the wild apple is
propagated; but commonly it springs up at wide intervals in woods and
swamp, and by the sides of roads, as the soil may suit it, and grows
with comparative rapidity. Those which grow in dense woods are very
tall and slender. I frequently pluck from these trees a perfectly
mild and tamed fruit. As Palladius says, "_Et injussu consternitur
ubere mali_:" And the ground is strewn with the fruit of an unbidden
apple tree.
It is an old notion that, if these wild trees do not bear a valuable
fruit of their own, they are the best stocks by which to transmit to
posterity the most highly prized qualities of others. However, I am
not in search of stocks, but the wild fruit itself, whose fierce gust
has suffered no "inteneration. " It is not my
"highest plot
To plant the Bergamot. "
THE FRUIT, AND ITS FLAVOR
The time for wild apples is the last of October and the first of
November. They then get to be palatable, for they ripen late, and they
are still perhaps as beautiful as ever. I make a great account of
these fruits, which the farmers do not think it worth the while to
gather,--wild flavors of the Muse, vivacious and inspiriting. The
farmer thinks that he has better in his barrels, but he is mistaken,
unless he has a walker's appetite and imagination, neither of which
can he have.
Such as grow quite wild, and are left out till the first of November,
I presume that the owner does not mean to gather. They belong to
children as wild as themselves,--to certain active boys that I
know,--to the wild-eyed woman of the fields, to whom nothing comes
amiss, who gleans after all the world, and, moreover, to us walkers.
We have met with them, and they are ours. These rights, long enough
insisted upon, have come to be an institution in some old countries,
where they have learned how to live. I hear that "the custom of
grippling, which may be called apple-gleaning, is, or was formerly,
practiced in Herefordshire. It consists in leaving a few apples, which
are called the gripples, on every tree, after the general gathering,
for the boys, who go with climbing-poles and bags to collect them. "
As for those I speak of, I pluck them as a wild fruit, native to this
quarter of the earth,--fruit of old trees that have been dying ever
since I was a boy and are not yet dead, frequented only by the
woodpecker and the squirrel, deserted now by the owner, who has not
faith enough to look under their boughs. From the appearance of the
tree-top, at a little distance, you would expect nothing but lichens
to drop from it, but your faith is rewarded by finding the ground
strewn with spirited fruit,--some of it, perhaps, collected at
squirrel-holes, with the marks of their teeth by which they carried
them,--some containing a cricket or two silently feeding within, and
some, especially in damp days, a shell-less snail. The very sticks and
stones lodged in the tree-top might have convinced you of the
savoriness of the fruit which has been so eagerly sought after in past
years.
I have seen no account of these among the "Fruits and Fruit-Trees of
America," though they are more memorable to my taste than the grafted
kinds; more racy and wild American flavors do they possess when
October and November, when December and January, and perhaps February
and March even, have assuaged them somewhat. An old farmer in my
neighborhood, who always selects the right word, says that "they have
a kind of bow-arrow tang. "
Apples for grafting appear to have been selected commonly, not so much
for their spirited flavor, as for their mildness, their size, and
bearing qualities,--not so much for their beauty, as for their
fairness and soundness. Indeed, I have no faith in the selected lists
of pomological gentlemen. Their "Favorites" and "None-suches" and
"Seek-no-farthers," when I have fruited them, commonly turn out very
tame and forgettable. They are eaten with comparatively little zest,
and have no real _tang_ nor _smack_ to them.
What if some of these wildings are acrid and puckery, genuine
_verjuice_, do they not still belong to the _Pomaceae_, which are
uniformly innocent and kind to our race? I still begrudge them to the
cider-mill. Perhaps they are not fairly ripe yet.
No wonder that these small and high-colored apples are thought to make
the best cider. Loudon quotes from the "Herefordshire Report," that
"apples of a small size are always, if equal in quality, to be
preferred to those of a larger size, in order that the rind and kernel
may bear the greatest proportion to the pulp, which affords the
weakest and most watery juice. " And he says that, "to prove this, Dr.
Symonds, of Hereford, about the year 1800, made one hogshead of cider
entirely from the rinds and cores of apples, and another from the pulp
only, when the first was found of extraordinary strength and flavor,
while the latter was sweet and insipid. "
Evelyn says that the "Red-strake" was the favorite cider-apple in his
day; and he quotes one Dr. Newburg as saying, "In Jersey 'tis a
general observation, as I hear, that the more of red any apple has in
its rind, the more proper it is for this use. Pale-faced apples they
exclude as much as may be from their cider-vat. " This opinion still
prevails.
All apples are good in November. Those which the farmer leaves out as
unsalable and unpalatable to those who frequent the markets are
choicest fruit to the walker. But it is remarkable that the wild apple,
which I praise as so spirited and racy when eaten in the fields or
woods, being brought into the house has frequently a harsh and crabbed
taste. The Saunterer's Apple not even the saunterer can eat in the
house. The palate rejects it there, as it does haws and acorns, and
demands a tamed one; for there you miss the November air, which is the
sauce it is to be eaten with. Accordingly, when Tityrus, seeing the
lengthening shadows, invites Meliboeus to go home and pass the night
with him, he promises him _mild_ apples and soft chestnuts,--_mitia
poma_, _castaneae molles_. I frequently pluck wild apples of so rich
and spicy a flavor that I wonder all orchardists do not get a scion
from that tree, and I fail not to bring home my pockets full. But
perchance, when I take one out of my desk and taste it in my chamber,
I find it unexpectedly crude,--sour enough to set a squirrel's teeth
on edge and make a jay scream.
These apples have hung in the wind and frost and rain till they have
absorbed the qualities of the weather or season, and thus are highly
_seasoned_, and they _pierce_ and _sting_ and _permeate_ us with their
spirit. They must be eaten in _season_, accordingly,--that is,
out-of-doors.
To appreciate the wild and sharp flavors of these October fruits, it
is necessary that you be breathing the sharp October or November air.
The outdoor air and exercise which the walker gets give a different
tone to his palate, and he craves a fruit which the sedentary would
call harsh and crabbed. They must be eaten in the fields, when your
system is all aglow with exercise, when the frosty weather nips your
fingers, the wind rattles the bare boughs or rustles the few remaining
leaves, and the jay is heard screaming around. What is sour in the
house a bracing walk makes sweet. Some of these apples might be
labeled, "To be eaten in the wind. "
Of course no flavors are thrown away; they are intended for the taste
that is up to them. Some apples have two distinct flavors, and perhaps
one half of them must be eaten in the house, the other outdoors. One
Peter Whitney wrote from Northborough in 1782, for the Proceedings of
the Boston Academy, describing an apple tree in that town "producing
fruit of opposite qualities, part of the same apple being frequently
sour and the other sweet;" also some all sour, and others all sweet,
and this diversity on all parts of the tree.
There is a wild apple on Nawshawtuct Hill in my town which has to me a
peculiarly pleasant bitter tang, not perceived till it is
three-quarters tasted. It remains on the tongue. As you eat it, it
smells exactly like a squash-bug. It is a sort of triumph to eat and
relish it.
I hear that the fruit of a kind of plum tree in Provence is "called
_Prunes sibarelles_, because it is impossible to whistle after having
eaten them, from their sourness. " But perhaps they were only eaten in
the house and in summer, and if tried out-of-doors in a stinging
atmosphere, who knows but you could whistle an octave higher and
clearer?
In the fields only are the sours and bitters of Nature appreciated;
just as the woodchopper eats his meal in a sunny glade, in the middle
of a winter day, with content, basks in a sunny ray there, and dreams
of summer in a degree of cold which, experienced in a chamber, would
make a student miserable. They who are at work abroad are not cold,
but rather it is they who sit shivering in houses. As with
temperatures, so with flavors; as with cold and heat, so with sour and
sweet. This natural raciness, the sours and bitters which the diseased
palate refuses, are the true condiments.
Let your condiments be in the condition of your senses. To appreciate
the flavor of these wild apples requires vigorous and healthy senses,
_papillae_ firm and erect on the tongue and palate, not easily
flattened and tamed.
From my experience with wild apples, I can understand that there may
be reason for a savage's preferring many kinds of food which the
civilized man rejects. The former has the palate of an outdoor man. It
takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit.
What a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes to relish the apple of
life, the apple of the world, then!
"Nor is it every apple I desire,
Nor that which pleases every palate best;
'Tis not the lasting Deuxan I require,
Nor yet the red-cheeked Greening I request,
Nor that which first beshrewed the name of wife,
Nor that whose beauty caused the golden strife:
No, no! bring me an apple from the tree of life. "
So there is one _thought_ for the field, another for the house. I
would have my thoughts, like wild apples, to be food for walkers, and
will not warrant them to be palatable if tasted in the house.
THEIR BEAUTY
Almost all wild apples are handsome. They cannot be too gnarly and
crabbed and rusty to look at. The gnarliest will have some redeeming
traits even to the eye. You will discover some evening redness dashed
or sprinkled on some protuberance or in some cavity. It is rare that
the summer lets an apple go without streaking or spotting it on some
part of its sphere. It will have some red stains, commemorating the
mornings and evenings it has witnessed; some dark and rusty blotches,
in memory of the clouds and foggy, mildewy days that have passed over
it; and a spacious field of green reflecting the general face of
nature,--green even as the fields; or a yellow ground, which implies a
milder flavor,--yellow as the harvest, or russet as the hills.
Apples, these I mean, unspeakably fair,--apples not of Discord, but of
Concord! Yet not so rare but that the homeliest may have a share.
Painted by the frosts, some a uniform clear bright yellow, or red, or
crimson, as if their spheres had regularly revolved, and enjoyed the
influence of the sun on all sides alike,--some with the faintest pink
blush imaginable,--some brindled with deep red streaks like a cow, or
with hundreds of fine blood-red rays running regularly from the
stem-dimple to the blossom end, like meridional lines, on a
straw-colored ground,--some touched with a greenish rust, like a fine
lichen, here and there, with crimson blotches or eyes more or less
confluent and fiery when wet,--and others gnarly, and freckled or
peppered all over on the stem side with fine crimson spots on a white
ground, as if accidentally sprinkled from the brush of Him who paints
the autumn leaves. Others, again, are sometimes red inside, perfused
with a beautiful blush, fairy food, too beautiful to eat,--apple of
the Hesperides, apple of the evening sky! But like shells and pebbles
on the seashore, they must be seen as they sparkle amid the withering
leaves in some dell in the woods, in the autumnal air, or as they lie
in the wet grass, and not when they have wilted and faded in the
house.
THE NAMING OF THEM
It would be a pleasant pastime to find suitable names for the hundred
varieties which go to a single heap at the cider-mill. Would it not
tax a man's invention,--no one to be named after a man, and all in the
_lingua vernacula_? Who shall stand godfather at the christening of
the wild apples? It would exhaust the Latin and Greek languages, if
they were used, and make the _lingua vernacula_ flag. We should have
to call in the sunrise and the sunset, the rainbow and the autumn
woods and the wild-flowers, and the woodpecker and the purple finch
and the squirrel and the jay and the butterfly, the November traveler
and the truant boy, to our aid.
In 1836 there were in the garden of the London Horticultural Society
more than fourteen hundred distinct sorts. But here are species which
they have not in their catalogue, not to mention the varieties which
our crab might yield to cultivation.
Let us enumerate a few of these. I find myself compelled, after all,
to give the Latin names of some for the benefit of those who live
where English is not spoken,--for they are likely to have a world-wide
reputation.
There is, first of all, the Wood Apple (_Malus sylvatica_); the
Blue-Jay Apple; the Apple which grows in Dells in the Woods
(_sylvestrivallis_), also in Hollows in Pastures (_campestrivallis_);
the Apple that grows in an old Cellar-Hole (_Malus cellaris_); the
Meadow Apple; the Partridge Apple; the Truant's Apple (_cessatoris_),
which no boy will ever go by without knocking off some, however _late_
it may be; the Saunterer's Apple,--you must lose yourself before you
can find the way to that; the Beauty of the Air (_decus aeris_);
December-Eating; the Frozen-Thawed (_gelato-soluta_), good only in
that state; the Concord Apple, possibly the same with the
_Musketaquidensis_; the Assabet Apple; the Brindled Apple; Wine of New
England; the Chickaree Apple; the Green Apple (_Malus viridis_),--this
has many synonyms: in an imperfect state, it is the _choleramorbifera
aut dysenterifera_, _puerulis dilectissima_; the Apple which Atalanta
stopped to pick up; the Hedge Apple (_Malus sepium_); the Slug Apple
(_limacea_); the Railroad Apple, which perhaps came from a core thrown
out of the cars; the Apple whose Fruit we tasted in our Youth; our
Particular Apple, not to be found in any catalogue; _pedestrium
solatium_; also the Apple where hangs the Forgotten Scythe; Iduna's
Apples, and the Apples which Loki found in the Wood; and a great many
more I have on my list, too numerous to mention,--all of them good. As
Bodaeus exclaims, referring to the cultivated kinds, and adapting
Virgil to his case, so I, adapting Bodaeus,--
"Not if I had a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths,
An iron voice, could I describe all the forms
And reckon up all the names of these _wild apples_. "
THE LAST GLEANING
By the middle of November the wild apples have lost some of their
brilliancy, and have chiefly fallen. A great part are decayed on the
ground, and the sound ones are more palatable than before. The note of
the chickadee sounds now more distinct, as you wander amid the old
trees, and the autumnal dandelion is half closed and tearful. But
still, if you are a skillful gleaner, you may get many a pocketful
even of grafted fruit, long after apples are supposed to be gone
out-of-doors. I know a Blue Pearmain tree, growing within the edge of
a swamp, almost as good as wild. You would not suppose that there was
any fruit left there, on the first survey, but you must look according
to system. Those which lie exposed are quite brown and rotten now, or
perchance a few still show one blooming cheek here and there amid the
wet leaves. Nevertheless, with experienced eyes, I explore amid the
bare alders and the huckleberry bushes and the withered sedge, and in
the crevices of the rocks, which are full of leaves, and pry under
the fallen and decaying ferns, which, with apple and alder leaves,
thickly strew the ground. For I know that they lie concealed, fallen
into hollows long since and covered up by the leaves of the tree
itself,--a proper kind of packing. From these lurking-places, anywhere
within the circumference of the tree, I draw forth the fruit, all wet
and glossy, maybe nibbled by rabbits and hollowed out by crickets, and
perhaps with a leaf or two cemented to it (as Curzon an old manuscript
from a monastery's mouldy cellar), but still with a rich bloom on it,
and at least as ripe and well-kept, if not better than those in
barrels, more crisp and lively than they. If these resources fail to
yield anything, I have learned to look between the bases of the
suckers which spring thickly from some horizontal limb, for now and
then one lodges there, or in the very midst of an alder-clump, where
they are covered by leaves, safe from cows which may have smelled them
out. If I am sharp-set, for I do not refuse the Blue Pearmain, I fill
my pockets on each side; and as I retrace my steps in the frosty eve,
being perhaps four or five miles from home, I eat one first from this
side, and then from that, to keep my balance.
I learn from Topsell's Gesner, whose authority appears to be Albertus,
that the following is the way in which the hedgehog collects and
carries home his apples. He says,--"His meat is apples, worms, or
grapes: when he findeth apples or grapes on the earth, he rolleth
himself upon them, until he have filled all his prickles, and then
carrieth them home to his den, never bearing above one in his mouth;
and if it fortune that one of them fall off by the way, he likewise
shaketh off all the residue, and walloweth upon them afresh, until
they be all settled upon his back again. So, forth he goeth, making a
noise like a cart-wheel; and if he have any young ones in his nest,
they pull off his load wherewithal he is loaded, eating thereof what
they please, and laying up the residue for the time to come. "
THE "FROZEN-THAWED" APPLE
Toward the end of November, though some of the sound ones are yet more
mellow and perhaps more edible, they have generally, like the leaves,
lost their beauty, and are beginning to freeze. It is finger-cold, and
prudent farmers get in their barreled apples, and bring you the apples
and cider which they have engaged; for it is time to put them into the
cellar. Perhaps a few on the ground show their red cheeks above the
early snow, and occasionally some even preserve their color and
soundness under the snow throughout the winter. But generally at the
beginning of the winter they freeze hard, and soon, though undecayed,
acquire the color of a baked apple.
Before the end of December, generally, they experience their first
thawing. Those which a month ago were sour, crabbed, and quite
unpalatable to the civilized taste, such at least as were frozen while
sound, let a warmer sun come to thaw them,--for they are extremely
sensitive to its rays,--are found to be filled with a rich, sweet
cider, better than any bottled cider that I know of, and with which I
am better acquainted than with wine. All apples are good in this
state, and your jaws are the cider-press. Others, which have more
substance, are a sweet and luscious food,--in my opinion of more worth
than the pineapples which are imported from the West Indies. Those
which lately even I tasted only to repent of it,--for I am
semicivilized,--which the farmer willingly left on the tree, I am now
glad to find have the property of hanging on like the leaves of the
young oaks. It is a way to keep cider sweet without boiling. Let the
frost come to freeze them first, solid as stones, and then the rain or
a warm winter day to thaw them, and they will seem to have borrowed a
flavor from heaven through the medium of the air in which they hang.
Or perchance you find, when you get home, that those which rattled in
your pocket have thawed, and the ice is turned to cider. But after the
third or fourth freezing and thawing they will not be found so good.
What are the imported half-ripe fruits of the torrid south, to this
fruit matured by the cold of the frigid north? These are those crabbed
apples with which I cheated my companion, and kept a smooth face that
I might tempt him to eat. Now we both greedily fill our pockets with
them,--bending to drink the cup and save our lappets from the
overflowing juice,--and grow more social with their wine. Was there
one that hung so high and sheltered by the tangled branches that our
sticks could not dislodge it?
It is a fruit never carried to market, that I am aware of,--quite
distinct from the apple of the markets, as from dried apple and
cider,--and it is not every winter that produces it in perfection.
The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past. It is a fruit which will
probably become extinct in New England. You may still wander through
old orchards of native fruit of great extent, which for the most part
went to the cider-mill, now all gone to decay. I have heard of an
orchard in a distant town, on the side of a hill, where the apples
rolled down and lay four feet deep against a wall on the lower side,
and this the owner cut down for fear they should be made into cider.
Since the temperance reform and the general introduction of grafted
fruit, no native apple trees, such as I see everywhere in deserted
pastures, and where the woods have grown up around them, are set out.
I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not
know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man, there are
many pleasures which he will not know! Notwithstanding the prevalence
of the Baldwin and the Porter, I doubt if so extensive orchards are
set out to-day in my town as there were a century ago, when those vast
straggling cider-orchards were planted, when men both ate and drank
apples, when the pomace-heap was the only nursery, and trees cost
nothing but the trouble of setting them out.
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. Thus it was a half-fabulous
tree to me. I contemplated a pilgrimage to the "Glades," a portion of
Pennsylvania where it was said to grow to perfection. I thought of
sending to a nursery for it, but doubted if they had it, or would
distinguish it from European varieties. At last I had occasion to go
to Minnesota, and on entering Michigan I began to notice from the cars
a tree with handsome rose-colored flowers. At first I thought it some
variety of thorn; but it was not long before the truth flashed on me,
that this was my long-sought crab-apple. It was the prevailing
flowering shrub or tree to be seen from the cars at that season of the
year,--about the middle of May. But the cars never stopped before one,
and so I was launched on the bosom of the Mississippi without having
touched one, experiencing the fate of Tantalus. On arriving at St.
Anthony's Falls, I was sorry to be told that I was too far north for
the crab-apple. Nevertheless I succeeded in finding it about eight
miles west of the Falls; touched it and smelled it, and secured a
lingering corymb of flowers for my herbarium. This must have been near
its northern limit.
HOW THE WILD APPLE GROWS
But though these are indigenous, like the Indians, I doubt whether
they are any hardier than those backwoodsmen among the apple trees,
which, though descended from cultivated stocks, plant themselves in
distant fields and forests, where the soil is favorable to them. I
know of no trees which have more difficulties to contend with, and
which more sturdily resist their foes. These are the ones whose story
we have to tell. It oftentimes reads thus:--
Near the beginning of May, we notice little thickets of apple trees
just springing up in the pastures where cattle have been,--as the
rocky ones of our Easterbrooks Country, or the top of Nobscot Hill, in
Sudbury. One or two of these, perhaps, survive the drought and other
accidents,--their very birthplace defending them against the
encroaching grass and some other dangers, at first.
In two years' time 't had thus
Reached the level of the rocks,
Admired the stretching world,
Nor feared the wandering flocks.
But at this tender age
Its sufferings began:
There came a browsing ox
And cut it down a span.
This time, perhaps, the ox does not notice it amid the grass; but the
next year, when it has grown more stout, he recognizes it for a
fellow-emigrant from the old country, the flavor of whose leaves and
twigs he well knows; and though at first he pauses to welcome it, and
express his surprise, and gets for answer, "The same cause that
brought you here brought me," he nevertheless browses it again,
reflecting, it may be, that he has some title to it.
Thus cut down annually, it does not despair; but, putting forth two
short twigs for every one cut off, it spreads out low along the ground
in the hollows or between the rocks, growing more stout and scrubby,
until it forms, not a tree as yet, but a little pyramidal, stiff,
twiggy mass, almost as solid and impenetrable as a rock. Some of the
densest and most impenetrable clumps of bushes that I have ever seen,
as well on account of the closeness and stubbornness of their branches
as of their thorns, have been these wild apple scrubs. They are more
like the scrubby fir and black spruce on which you stand, and
sometimes walk, on the tops of mountains, where cold is the demon they
contend with, than anything else. No wonder they are prompted to grow
thorns at last, to defend themselves against such foes. In their
thorniness, however, there is no malice, only some malic acid.
The rocky pastures of the tract I have referred to--for they maintain
their ground best in a rocky field--are thickly sprinkled with these
little tufts, reminding you often of some rigid gray mosses or
lichens, and you see thousands of little trees just springing up
between them, with the seed still attached to them.
Being regularly clipped all around each year by the cows, as a hedge
with shears, they are often of a perfect conical or pyramidal form,
from one to four feet high, and more or less sharp, as if trimmed by
the gardener's art. In the pastures on Nobscot Hill and its spurs,
they make fine dark shadows when the sun is low. They are also an
excellent covert from hawks for many small birds that roost and build
in them. Whole flocks perch in them at night, and I have seen three
robins' nests in one which was six feet in diameter.
No doubt many of these are already old trees, if you reckon from the
day they were planted, but infants still when you consider their
development and the long life before them. I counted the annual rings
of some which were just one foot high, and as wide as high, and found
that they were about twelve years old, but quite sound and thrifty!
They were so low that they were unnoticed by the walker, while many of
their contemporaries from the nurseries were already bearing
considerable crops. But what you gain in time is perhaps in this case,
too, lost in power,--that is, in the vigor of the tree. This is their
pyramidal state.
The cows continue to browse them thus for twenty years or more,
keeping them down and compelling them to spread, until at last they
are so broad that they become their own fence, when some interior
shoot, which their foes cannot reach, darts upward with joy: for it
has not forgotten its high calling, and bears its own peculiar fruit
in triumph.
Such are the tactics by which it finally defeats its bovine foes. Now,
if you have watched the progress of a particular shrub, you will see
that it is no longer a simple pyramid or cone, but that out of its
apex there rises a sprig or two, growing more lustily perchance than
an orchard-tree, since the plant now devotes the whole of its
repressed energy to these upright parts. In a short time these become
a small tree, an inverted pyramid resting on the apex of the other, so
that the whole has now the form of a vast hour-glass. The spreading
bottom, having served its purpose, finally disappears, and the
generous tree permits the now harmless cows to come in and stand in
its shade, and rub against and redden its trunk, which has grown in
spite of them, and even to taste a part of its fruit, and so disperse
the seed.
Thus the cows create their own shade and food; and the tree, its
hour-glass being inverted, lives a second life, as it were.
It is an important question with some nowadays, whether you should
trim young apple trees as high as your nose or as high as your eyes.
The ox trims them up as high as he can reach, and that is about the
right height, I think.
In spite of wandering kine, and other adverse circumstances, that
despised shrub, valued only by small birds as a covert and shelter
from hawks, has its blossom week at last, and in course of time its
harvest, sincere, though small.
By the end of some October, when its leaves have fallen, I frequently
see such a central sprig, whose progress I have watched, when I
thought it had forgotten its destiny, as I had, bearing its first crop
of small green or yellow or rosy fruit, which the cows cannot get at
over the bushy and thorny hedge which surrounds it, and I make haste
to taste the new and undescribed variety. We have all heard of the
numerous varieties of fruit invented by Van Mons and Knight. This is
the system of Van Cow, and she has invented far more and more
memorable varieties than both of them.
Through what hardships it may attain to bear a sweet fruit! Though
somewhat small, it may prove equal, if not superior, in flavor to that
which has grown in a garden,--will perchance be all the sweeter and
more palatable for the very difficulties it has had to contend with.
Who knows but this chance wild fruit, planted by a cow or a bird on
some remote and rocky hillside, where it is as yet unobserved by man,
may be the choicest of all its kind, and foreign potentates shall hear
of it, and royal societies seek to propagate it, though the virtues of
the perhaps truly crabbed owner of the soil may never be heard of,--at
least, beyond the limits of his village? It was thus the Porter and
the Baldwin grew.
Every wild apple shrub excites our expectation thus, somewhat as every
wild child. It is, perhaps, a prince in disguise. What a lesson to
man! So are human beings, referred to the highest standard, the
celestial fruit which they suggest and aspire to bear, browsed on by
fate; and only the most persistent and strongest genius defends itself
and prevails, sends a tender scion upward at last, and drops its
perfect fruit on the ungrateful earth. Poets and philosophers and
statesmen thus spring up in the country pastures, and outlast the
hosts of unoriginal men.
Such is always the pursuit of knowledge. The celestial fruits, the
golden apples of the Hesperides, are ever guarded by a hundred-headed
dragon which never sleeps, so that it is an Herculean labor to pluck
them.
This is one, and the most remarkable way in which the wild apple is
propagated; but commonly it springs up at wide intervals in woods and
swamp, and by the sides of roads, as the soil may suit it, and grows
with comparative rapidity. Those which grow in dense woods are very
tall and slender. I frequently pluck from these trees a perfectly
mild and tamed fruit. As Palladius says, "_Et injussu consternitur
ubere mali_:" And the ground is strewn with the fruit of an unbidden
apple tree.
It is an old notion that, if these wild trees do not bear a valuable
fruit of their own, they are the best stocks by which to transmit to
posterity the most highly prized qualities of others. However, I am
not in search of stocks, but the wild fruit itself, whose fierce gust
has suffered no "inteneration. " It is not my
"highest plot
To plant the Bergamot. "
THE FRUIT, AND ITS FLAVOR
The time for wild apples is the last of October and the first of
November. They then get to be palatable, for they ripen late, and they
are still perhaps as beautiful as ever. I make a great account of
these fruits, which the farmers do not think it worth the while to
gather,--wild flavors of the Muse, vivacious and inspiriting. The
farmer thinks that he has better in his barrels, but he is mistaken,
unless he has a walker's appetite and imagination, neither of which
can he have.
Such as grow quite wild, and are left out till the first of November,
I presume that the owner does not mean to gather. They belong to
children as wild as themselves,--to certain active boys that I
know,--to the wild-eyed woman of the fields, to whom nothing comes
amiss, who gleans after all the world, and, moreover, to us walkers.
We have met with them, and they are ours. These rights, long enough
insisted upon, have come to be an institution in some old countries,
where they have learned how to live. I hear that "the custom of
grippling, which may be called apple-gleaning, is, or was formerly,
practiced in Herefordshire. It consists in leaving a few apples, which
are called the gripples, on every tree, after the general gathering,
for the boys, who go with climbing-poles and bags to collect them. "
As for those I speak of, I pluck them as a wild fruit, native to this
quarter of the earth,--fruit of old trees that have been dying ever
since I was a boy and are not yet dead, frequented only by the
woodpecker and the squirrel, deserted now by the owner, who has not
faith enough to look under their boughs. From the appearance of the
tree-top, at a little distance, you would expect nothing but lichens
to drop from it, but your faith is rewarded by finding the ground
strewn with spirited fruit,--some of it, perhaps, collected at
squirrel-holes, with the marks of their teeth by which they carried
them,--some containing a cricket or two silently feeding within, and
some, especially in damp days, a shell-less snail. The very sticks and
stones lodged in the tree-top might have convinced you of the
savoriness of the fruit which has been so eagerly sought after in past
years.
I have seen no account of these among the "Fruits and Fruit-Trees of
America," though they are more memorable to my taste than the grafted
kinds; more racy and wild American flavors do they possess when
October and November, when December and January, and perhaps February
and March even, have assuaged them somewhat. An old farmer in my
neighborhood, who always selects the right word, says that "they have
a kind of bow-arrow tang. "
Apples for grafting appear to have been selected commonly, not so much
for their spirited flavor, as for their mildness, their size, and
bearing qualities,--not so much for their beauty, as for their
fairness and soundness. Indeed, I have no faith in the selected lists
of pomological gentlemen. Their "Favorites" and "None-suches" and
"Seek-no-farthers," when I have fruited them, commonly turn out very
tame and forgettable. They are eaten with comparatively little zest,
and have no real _tang_ nor _smack_ to them.
What if some of these wildings are acrid and puckery, genuine
_verjuice_, do they not still belong to the _Pomaceae_, which are
uniformly innocent and kind to our race? I still begrudge them to the
cider-mill. Perhaps they are not fairly ripe yet.
No wonder that these small and high-colored apples are thought to make
the best cider. Loudon quotes from the "Herefordshire Report," that
"apples of a small size are always, if equal in quality, to be
preferred to those of a larger size, in order that the rind and kernel
may bear the greatest proportion to the pulp, which affords the
weakest and most watery juice. " And he says that, "to prove this, Dr.
Symonds, of Hereford, about the year 1800, made one hogshead of cider
entirely from the rinds and cores of apples, and another from the pulp
only, when the first was found of extraordinary strength and flavor,
while the latter was sweet and insipid. "
Evelyn says that the "Red-strake" was the favorite cider-apple in his
day; and he quotes one Dr. Newburg as saying, "In Jersey 'tis a
general observation, as I hear, that the more of red any apple has in
its rind, the more proper it is for this use. Pale-faced apples they
exclude as much as may be from their cider-vat. " This opinion still
prevails.
All apples are good in November. Those which the farmer leaves out as
unsalable and unpalatable to those who frequent the markets are
choicest fruit to the walker. But it is remarkable that the wild apple,
which I praise as so spirited and racy when eaten in the fields or
woods, being brought into the house has frequently a harsh and crabbed
taste. The Saunterer's Apple not even the saunterer can eat in the
house. The palate rejects it there, as it does haws and acorns, and
demands a tamed one; for there you miss the November air, which is the
sauce it is to be eaten with. Accordingly, when Tityrus, seeing the
lengthening shadows, invites Meliboeus to go home and pass the night
with him, he promises him _mild_ apples and soft chestnuts,--_mitia
poma_, _castaneae molles_. I frequently pluck wild apples of so rich
and spicy a flavor that I wonder all orchardists do not get a scion
from that tree, and I fail not to bring home my pockets full. But
perchance, when I take one out of my desk and taste it in my chamber,
I find it unexpectedly crude,--sour enough to set a squirrel's teeth
on edge and make a jay scream.
These apples have hung in the wind and frost and rain till they have
absorbed the qualities of the weather or season, and thus are highly
_seasoned_, and they _pierce_ and _sting_ and _permeate_ us with their
spirit. They must be eaten in _season_, accordingly,--that is,
out-of-doors.
To appreciate the wild and sharp flavors of these October fruits, it
is necessary that you be breathing the sharp October or November air.
The outdoor air and exercise which the walker gets give a different
tone to his palate, and he craves a fruit which the sedentary would
call harsh and crabbed. They must be eaten in the fields, when your
system is all aglow with exercise, when the frosty weather nips your
fingers, the wind rattles the bare boughs or rustles the few remaining
leaves, and the jay is heard screaming around. What is sour in the
house a bracing walk makes sweet. Some of these apples might be
labeled, "To be eaten in the wind. "
Of course no flavors are thrown away; they are intended for the taste
that is up to them. Some apples have two distinct flavors, and perhaps
one half of them must be eaten in the house, the other outdoors. One
Peter Whitney wrote from Northborough in 1782, for the Proceedings of
the Boston Academy, describing an apple tree in that town "producing
fruit of opposite qualities, part of the same apple being frequently
sour and the other sweet;" also some all sour, and others all sweet,
and this diversity on all parts of the tree.
There is a wild apple on Nawshawtuct Hill in my town which has to me a
peculiarly pleasant bitter tang, not perceived till it is
three-quarters tasted. It remains on the tongue. As you eat it, it
smells exactly like a squash-bug. It is a sort of triumph to eat and
relish it.
I hear that the fruit of a kind of plum tree in Provence is "called
_Prunes sibarelles_, because it is impossible to whistle after having
eaten them, from their sourness. " But perhaps they were only eaten in
the house and in summer, and if tried out-of-doors in a stinging
atmosphere, who knows but you could whistle an octave higher and
clearer?
In the fields only are the sours and bitters of Nature appreciated;
just as the woodchopper eats his meal in a sunny glade, in the middle
of a winter day, with content, basks in a sunny ray there, and dreams
of summer in a degree of cold which, experienced in a chamber, would
make a student miserable. They who are at work abroad are not cold,
but rather it is they who sit shivering in houses. As with
temperatures, so with flavors; as with cold and heat, so with sour and
sweet. This natural raciness, the sours and bitters which the diseased
palate refuses, are the true condiments.
Let your condiments be in the condition of your senses. To appreciate
the flavor of these wild apples requires vigorous and healthy senses,
_papillae_ firm and erect on the tongue and palate, not easily
flattened and tamed.
From my experience with wild apples, I can understand that there may
be reason for a savage's preferring many kinds of food which the
civilized man rejects. The former has the palate of an outdoor man. It
takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit.
What a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes to relish the apple of
life, the apple of the world, then!
"Nor is it every apple I desire,
Nor that which pleases every palate best;
'Tis not the lasting Deuxan I require,
Nor yet the red-cheeked Greening I request,
Nor that which first beshrewed the name of wife,
Nor that whose beauty caused the golden strife:
No, no! bring me an apple from the tree of life. "
So there is one _thought_ for the field, another for the house. I
would have my thoughts, like wild apples, to be food for walkers, and
will not warrant them to be palatable if tasted in the house.
THEIR BEAUTY
Almost all wild apples are handsome. They cannot be too gnarly and
crabbed and rusty to look at. The gnarliest will have some redeeming
traits even to the eye. You will discover some evening redness dashed
or sprinkled on some protuberance or in some cavity. It is rare that
the summer lets an apple go without streaking or spotting it on some
part of its sphere. It will have some red stains, commemorating the
mornings and evenings it has witnessed; some dark and rusty blotches,
in memory of the clouds and foggy, mildewy days that have passed over
it; and a spacious field of green reflecting the general face of
nature,--green even as the fields; or a yellow ground, which implies a
milder flavor,--yellow as the harvest, or russet as the hills.
Apples, these I mean, unspeakably fair,--apples not of Discord, but of
Concord! Yet not so rare but that the homeliest may have a share.
Painted by the frosts, some a uniform clear bright yellow, or red, or
crimson, as if their spheres had regularly revolved, and enjoyed the
influence of the sun on all sides alike,--some with the faintest pink
blush imaginable,--some brindled with deep red streaks like a cow, or
with hundreds of fine blood-red rays running regularly from the
stem-dimple to the blossom end, like meridional lines, on a
straw-colored ground,--some touched with a greenish rust, like a fine
lichen, here and there, with crimson blotches or eyes more or less
confluent and fiery when wet,--and others gnarly, and freckled or
peppered all over on the stem side with fine crimson spots on a white
ground, as if accidentally sprinkled from the brush of Him who paints
the autumn leaves. Others, again, are sometimes red inside, perfused
with a beautiful blush, fairy food, too beautiful to eat,--apple of
the Hesperides, apple of the evening sky! But like shells and pebbles
on the seashore, they must be seen as they sparkle amid the withering
leaves in some dell in the woods, in the autumnal air, or as they lie
in the wet grass, and not when they have wilted and faded in the
house.
THE NAMING OF THEM
It would be a pleasant pastime to find suitable names for the hundred
varieties which go to a single heap at the cider-mill. Would it not
tax a man's invention,--no one to be named after a man, and all in the
_lingua vernacula_? Who shall stand godfather at the christening of
the wild apples? It would exhaust the Latin and Greek languages, if
they were used, and make the _lingua vernacula_ flag. We should have
to call in the sunrise and the sunset, the rainbow and the autumn
woods and the wild-flowers, and the woodpecker and the purple finch
and the squirrel and the jay and the butterfly, the November traveler
and the truant boy, to our aid.
In 1836 there were in the garden of the London Horticultural Society
more than fourteen hundred distinct sorts. But here are species which
they have not in their catalogue, not to mention the varieties which
our crab might yield to cultivation.
Let us enumerate a few of these. I find myself compelled, after all,
to give the Latin names of some for the benefit of those who live
where English is not spoken,--for they are likely to have a world-wide
reputation.
There is, first of all, the Wood Apple (_Malus sylvatica_); the
Blue-Jay Apple; the Apple which grows in Dells in the Woods
(_sylvestrivallis_), also in Hollows in Pastures (_campestrivallis_);
the Apple that grows in an old Cellar-Hole (_Malus cellaris_); the
Meadow Apple; the Partridge Apple; the Truant's Apple (_cessatoris_),
which no boy will ever go by without knocking off some, however _late_
it may be; the Saunterer's Apple,--you must lose yourself before you
can find the way to that; the Beauty of the Air (_decus aeris_);
December-Eating; the Frozen-Thawed (_gelato-soluta_), good only in
that state; the Concord Apple, possibly the same with the
_Musketaquidensis_; the Assabet Apple; the Brindled Apple; Wine of New
England; the Chickaree Apple; the Green Apple (_Malus viridis_),--this
has many synonyms: in an imperfect state, it is the _choleramorbifera
aut dysenterifera_, _puerulis dilectissima_; the Apple which Atalanta
stopped to pick up; the Hedge Apple (_Malus sepium_); the Slug Apple
(_limacea_); the Railroad Apple, which perhaps came from a core thrown
out of the cars; the Apple whose Fruit we tasted in our Youth; our
Particular Apple, not to be found in any catalogue; _pedestrium
solatium_; also the Apple where hangs the Forgotten Scythe; Iduna's
Apples, and the Apples which Loki found in the Wood; and a great many
more I have on my list, too numerous to mention,--all of them good. As
Bodaeus exclaims, referring to the cultivated kinds, and adapting
Virgil to his case, so I, adapting Bodaeus,--
"Not if I had a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths,
An iron voice, could I describe all the forms
And reckon up all the names of these _wild apples_. "
THE LAST GLEANING
By the middle of November the wild apples have lost some of their
brilliancy, and have chiefly fallen. A great part are decayed on the
ground, and the sound ones are more palatable than before. The note of
the chickadee sounds now more distinct, as you wander amid the old
trees, and the autumnal dandelion is half closed and tearful. But
still, if you are a skillful gleaner, you may get many a pocketful
even of grafted fruit, long after apples are supposed to be gone
out-of-doors. I know a Blue Pearmain tree, growing within the edge of
a swamp, almost as good as wild. You would not suppose that there was
any fruit left there, on the first survey, but you must look according
to system. Those which lie exposed are quite brown and rotten now, or
perchance a few still show one blooming cheek here and there amid the
wet leaves. Nevertheless, with experienced eyes, I explore amid the
bare alders and the huckleberry bushes and the withered sedge, and in
the crevices of the rocks, which are full of leaves, and pry under
the fallen and decaying ferns, which, with apple and alder leaves,
thickly strew the ground. For I know that they lie concealed, fallen
into hollows long since and covered up by the leaves of the tree
itself,--a proper kind of packing. From these lurking-places, anywhere
within the circumference of the tree, I draw forth the fruit, all wet
and glossy, maybe nibbled by rabbits and hollowed out by crickets, and
perhaps with a leaf or two cemented to it (as Curzon an old manuscript
from a monastery's mouldy cellar), but still with a rich bloom on it,
and at least as ripe and well-kept, if not better than those in
barrels, more crisp and lively than they. If these resources fail to
yield anything, I have learned to look between the bases of the
suckers which spring thickly from some horizontal limb, for now and
then one lodges there, or in the very midst of an alder-clump, where
they are covered by leaves, safe from cows which may have smelled them
out. If I am sharp-set, for I do not refuse the Blue Pearmain, I fill
my pockets on each side; and as I retrace my steps in the frosty eve,
being perhaps four or five miles from home, I eat one first from this
side, and then from that, to keep my balance.
I learn from Topsell's Gesner, whose authority appears to be Albertus,
that the following is the way in which the hedgehog collects and
carries home his apples. He says,--"His meat is apples, worms, or
grapes: when he findeth apples or grapes on the earth, he rolleth
himself upon them, until he have filled all his prickles, and then
carrieth them home to his den, never bearing above one in his mouth;
and if it fortune that one of them fall off by the way, he likewise
shaketh off all the residue, and walloweth upon them afresh, until
they be all settled upon his back again. So, forth he goeth, making a
noise like a cart-wheel; and if he have any young ones in his nest,
they pull off his load wherewithal he is loaded, eating thereof what
they please, and laying up the residue for the time to come. "
THE "FROZEN-THAWED" APPLE
Toward the end of November, though some of the sound ones are yet more
mellow and perhaps more edible, they have generally, like the leaves,
lost their beauty, and are beginning to freeze. It is finger-cold, and
prudent farmers get in their barreled apples, and bring you the apples
and cider which they have engaged; for it is time to put them into the
cellar. Perhaps a few on the ground show their red cheeks above the
early snow, and occasionally some even preserve their color and
soundness under the snow throughout the winter. But generally at the
beginning of the winter they freeze hard, and soon, though undecayed,
acquire the color of a baked apple.
Before the end of December, generally, they experience their first
thawing. Those which a month ago were sour, crabbed, and quite
unpalatable to the civilized taste, such at least as were frozen while
sound, let a warmer sun come to thaw them,--for they are extremely
sensitive to its rays,--are found to be filled with a rich, sweet
cider, better than any bottled cider that I know of, and with which I
am better acquainted than with wine. All apples are good in this
state, and your jaws are the cider-press. Others, which have more
substance, are a sweet and luscious food,--in my opinion of more worth
than the pineapples which are imported from the West Indies. Those
which lately even I tasted only to repent of it,--for I am
semicivilized,--which the farmer willingly left on the tree, I am now
glad to find have the property of hanging on like the leaves of the
young oaks. It is a way to keep cider sweet without boiling. Let the
frost come to freeze them first, solid as stones, and then the rain or
a warm winter day to thaw them, and they will seem to have borrowed a
flavor from heaven through the medium of the air in which they hang.
Or perchance you find, when you get home, that those which rattled in
your pocket have thawed, and the ice is turned to cider. But after the
third or fourth freezing and thawing they will not be found so good.
What are the imported half-ripe fruits of the torrid south, to this
fruit matured by the cold of the frigid north? These are those crabbed
apples with which I cheated my companion, and kept a smooth face that
I might tempt him to eat. Now we both greedily fill our pockets with
them,--bending to drink the cup and save our lappets from the
overflowing juice,--and grow more social with their wine. Was there
one that hung so high and sheltered by the tangled branches that our
sticks could not dislodge it?
It is a fruit never carried to market, that I am aware of,--quite
distinct from the apple of the markets, as from dried apple and
cider,--and it is not every winter that produces it in perfection.
The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past. It is a fruit which will
probably become extinct in New England. You may still wander through
old orchards of native fruit of great extent, which for the most part
went to the cider-mill, now all gone to decay. I have heard of an
orchard in a distant town, on the side of a hill, where the apples
rolled down and lay four feet deep against a wall on the lower side,
and this the owner cut down for fear they should be made into cider.
Since the temperance reform and the general introduction of grafted
fruit, no native apple trees, such as I see everywhere in deserted
pastures, and where the woods have grown up around them, are set out.
I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not
know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man, there are
many pleasures which he will not know! Notwithstanding the prevalence
of the Baldwin and the Porter, I doubt if so extensive orchards are
set out to-day in my town as there were a century ago, when those vast
straggling cider-orchards were planted, when men both ate and drank
apples, when the pomace-heap was the only nursery, and trees cost
nothing but the trouble of setting them out.
