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

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 back-woodsmen 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 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 circumstance, 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

[Footnote: A Belgian chemist and horticulturist.] and Knight.

[Footnote: An English vegetable physiologist.] 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 swamps, 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, “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, practised 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,