Wild Apples - Henry David Thoreau (good english books to read .TXT) 📗
- Author: Henry David Thoreau
- Performer: -
Book online «Wild Apples - Henry David Thoreau (good english books to read .TXT) 📗». Author Henry David Thoreau
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
Comments (0)