Go out into the woods, and you will find wild crab apple trees, bearing
hard, sour little apples, unfit to eat. Four distinct kinds are native to
this country. In Eastern Asia wild apple trees grow in greater variety
than here. Our orchard apple trees are descended from these Oriental wild
apples, which were brought under cultivation long before America was
discovered. Nurserymen in Europe and Japan have for centuries worked with
the wild species to improve them. The Japanese worked to produce finer
flowering trees. European horticulturists desired finer and larger fruit.
American orchards show how well they have succeeded. For over a century
American horticulture has made marked progress. Many valuable kinds of
fruit have originated in this country. Our own wild apples are now
studied with the aim of bringing them into cultivation, just as the
Asiatic species were improved centuries ago. It is a wonderful work,
accomplished by crossing, grafting, budding, by fertilising, and good
tillage,—processes too special to be explained in this book.
The taming of wild apples, however, is one of the great achievements of
the centuries. Every boy and every girl who enjoys the eating of a fine
apple will wish to know how such glorious fruit, in abundance sufficient
to supply the world’s needs, has been produced from such unpromising
beginnings as the gnarled little crab trees scattered through the woods,
and dwarfed by the larger forest trees that overshadowed them.
“Grafting” or “budding” a little tree insures that the fruit it bears
later on will be of the variety of the tree from which the scions came.
Only once in a long while does a good variety of fruit come on a seedling
tree. Plant the seed of the best apple you ever ate, and then wait a
dozen years or more for this tree to bear fruit. The chances are
ninety-nine to one that the apples turn out to be miserable, sour, or
tasteless nubbins, like the roadside apples, that nobody planted. It is
too expensive to experiment in hope of getting good varieties from seed.
“Johnny Appleseed” was a funny old fellow who wandered up and down the
Ohio valley states, and planted apple seeds wherever he went. Queer, and
perhaps crazy, he was a kindly soul, who dreamed of the days when
orchards should dot the landscape, and be a part of every farm homestead.
He did what he could to make the wild prairie wilderness blossom and bear
fruit. No doubt many pioneer orchards came from his planting. Seedling
trees, all of them, for he believed firmly that it is _wrong_ to graft a
tree!
Each year better and bigger apples are shown at fairs, and fruit shows.
The history of apple culture is full of interest. It requires hundreds of
books to tell the story. But any man who has an orchard can tell you how
his trees were made into the varieties he ordered at the nursery. He may
show you how grafting and budding is done, and how a tree may be made
over in a few years to change entirely the kind of apple it bears. He may
show a tree that bears distinct kinds of apples on different limbs, and
show you the scar of the graft from which each new variety has sprung.
When you are old enough, you can grow apple trees from seed, and graft or
bud them to the variety you choose,—greening, russet, northern spy—taking
your scions from a tree whose apples are especially fine. It is a
fascinating game to play, with the soil, and the sun, and the rain all
working with you to help you win.
Meanwhile, the wild apple, though worthless as a fruit tree, is well
worth knowing. No well-fed orchard tree has charm to compare with this
wild thing when spring transforms its ugly, thorny twigs.
The rosy blossoms of the wild crab apple come out of a multitude of
coral-red buds which open just after the leaves. The gnarled limbs are
bare and ugly, until late in May. Then the silvery, velvet leaves unfold,
scarcely green at first, because each one wears so thick a garment of
soft, white hairs. Before the leaves have lost this velvet coat, the
flower buds begin to glow, and the tree top is soon blushing with the
blossoms, and the air is full of their spicy fragrance.
[Illustration: An old apple orchard is a fairy land indeed when blossoms
cover the trees]
[Illustration: Nothing tastes so good as ripe apples picked right off the
tree!]
Their charm is the charm of the wild rose. Their arrangement on the
gnarled twigs is irregular. The artist loves the unstudied grace of it.
The great botanist, Linnæus, probably saw only pressed specimens, but he
named the tree _coronaria_, which means, “fit for crowns and garlands.”
I remember gathering the little green apples in the fall. Hard, and
almost bitter, when eaten out of hand, they make a jelly that is as
distinct and delightful in its way as the flowers are more admirable than
common apple blossoms. The taste is wild, and almost bitter, but beside
it ordinary apple jelly tastes insipid. Perhaps I am prejudiced, and the
memory of that wild crab-apple jelly too remote to be depended upon. But
many people agree with me. If you are in the woods in October, and come
to a thicket of trees bearing flat, yellow apples, pick as many as you
can carry home. Smell their spicy fragrance, and persuade your mother to
make them into jelly, so that you can form your own opinion of it.
The Eastern crab apple grows over a large part of the region between the
Atlantic coast, and the dry plains east of the Rocky Mountains, and south
to Northern Alabama and Texas. The prairie crab, a different species,
grows in the Mississippi Valley. A narrow-leaved species grows in the
South, and the Oregon crab is the native wild apple of the woods, from
California north into Alaska.
Quinces are core fruits, cousins of the apples. So are pears. All of our
orchard pears and quinces are cultivated varieties of species that once
grew wild in Europe or Asia. The Japanese quince in America is a hedge
plant which in spring covers its bare twigs with large, deep
rose-coloured flowers, and bears hard, freckled fruits that smell better
than they taste, in September. We know all these fruits, and have them in
our gardens, but they are foreigners here, though much at home. We have
no native pears or quinces in America.