Wild Apples by Henry David Thoreau (best non fiction books of all time TXT) 📕

its fragrance of all the wealth of

Pomona, [Footnote: The Roman goddess of fruit and fruit-trees.]—

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, [Footnote: Jotunheim (Ye(r)t’-

un-hime) in Scandinavian mythology was the home of the Jotun or

Giants. Loki was a descendant of the gods, and a companion of the

Giants. Thjassi (Tee-assy) was a giant.] 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

banian-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 fifth and twentieth of October I see the barrels lie

under the trees. And perhaps I talk with one who is selecting some

choice barrels to fulfil 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 practised 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 bow, 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 whatever 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 plough

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.

 

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, “whose nature has not yet been modified by cultivation.” It

is found from Western New York to Minnesota and southward. Michaux

[Footnote: Pronounced mee-sho; a French botanist and traveller.]

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 sweet-meats, 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