WILD APPLE TREES AND THEIR KIN 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. Nursery men in Europe and Japan have for centuries worked with the wild species to improve them. The Japanese worked to produce finer flowed trees. European horticulturists desired larger fruit. American orchards they have succeeded. For over a century Amer ican 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 culti vation, just as the Asiatic species were improved centures ago. It is a wonderful work, accom plished by crossing, grafting, budding, by fer tilising, 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. leaves hances are ninety-nine to one that the apples x._ feiN - and miserable, sour, or tasteless nub bins, like the roadside apples, that nobody planted. It is too expensive to experiment in hope of get ting 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 be lieved 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 has sprung. When you are old enouzh_ grow apple trees from seed, and them to the variety you choose,—greening, russet, northern spy—taking your scions from a tree whose apples are especially fine. It is a fas cinating 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 blos soms, and the air is full of their spicy fragrance.
Their charm is the charm of the wild rose. Their arrangement on the gnarled twigs is irreg ular. The artist loves the unstudied grace of it. The great botanist, Linnaeus, probably saw only 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 Cal ifornia 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.