Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 by Various

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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 circumstances, 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 and Knight. 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 hill-side, 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, "_Et injussu consternitur ubere mali_":
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, native to this
quarter of the earth,--fruit of old trees that have been dying ever
since I was a boy and are not yet dead, frequented only by the
woodpecker and the squirrel, deserted now by the owner, who has not
faith enough to look under their boughs. From the appearance of the
tree-top, at a little distance, you would expect nothing but lichens to
drop from it, but your faith is rewarded by finding the ground strewn
with spirited fruit,--some of it, perhaps, collected at squirrel-holes,
with the marks of their teeth by which they carried them,--some
containing a cricket or two silently feeding within, and some,
especially in damp days, a shelless snail. The very sticks and stones
lodged in the tree-top might have convinced you of the savoriness of the
fruit which has been so eagerly sought after in past years.

I have seen no account of these among the "Fruits and Fruit-Trees of
America," though they are more memorable to my taste than the grafted
kinds; more racy and wild American flavors do they possess, when October
and November, when December and January, and perhaps February and March
even, have assuaged them somewhat. An old farmer in my neighborhood, who
always selects the right word, says that "they have a kind of bow-arrow
tang."

Apples for grafting appear to have been selected commonly, not so much
for their spirited flavor, as for their mildness, their size, and
bearing qualities,--not so much for their beauty, as for their fairness
and soundness. Indeed, I have no faith in the selected lists of
pomological gentlemen. Their "Favorites" and "None-suches" and
"Seek-no-farthers," when I have fruited them, commonly turn out very
tame and forgetable. They are eaten with comparatively little zest, and
have no real _tang_ nor _smack_ to them.

What if some of these wildings are acrid and puckery, genuine
_verjuice_, do they not still belong to the _Pomaceae_, which are
uniformly innocent and kind to our race? I still begrudge them to the
cider-mill. Perhaps they are not fairly ripe yet.

No wonder that these small and high-colored apples are thought to make
the best cider. Loudon quotes from the "Herefordshire Report," that
"apples of a small size are always, if equal in quality, to be preferred
to those of a larger size, in order that the rind and kernel may bear
the greatest proportion to the pulp, which affords the weakest and
most watery juice." And he says, that, "to prove this, Dr. Symonds, of
Hereford, about the year 1800, made one hogshead of cider entirely from
the rinds and cores of apples, and another from the pulp only, when the
first was found of extraordinary strength and flavor, while the latter
was sweet and insipid."

Evelyn says that the "Red-strake" was the favorite cider-apple in his
day; and he quotes one Dr. Newburg as saying, "In Jersey 't is a general
observation, as I hear, that the more of red any apple has in its rind,
the more proper it is for this use. Pale-faced apples they exclude as
much as may be from their cider-vat." This opinion still prevails.

All apples are good in November. Those which the farmer leaves out
as unsalable, and unpalatable to those who frequent the markets, are
choicest fruit to the walker. But it is remarkable that the wild apple,
which I praise as so spirited and racy when eaten in the fields or
woods, being brought into the house, has frequently a harsh and crabbed
taste. The Saunterer's Apple not even the saunterer can eat in the
house. The palate rejects it there, as it does haws and acorns, and
demands a tamed one; for there you miss the November air, which is the
sauce it is to be eaten with. Accordingly, when Tityrus, seeing the
lengthening shadows, invites Melibaeus to go home and pass the night
with him, he promises him _mild_ apples and soft chestnuts,--_mitia
poma, castaneae molles_. I frequently pluck wild apples of so rich and
spicy a flavor that I wonder all orchardists do not get a scion from
that tree, and I fail not to bring home my pockets full. But perchance,
when I take one out of my desk and taste it in my chamber, I find it
unexpectedly crude,--sour enough to set a squirrel's teeth on edge and
make a jay scream.

These apples have hung in the wind and frost and rain till they have
absorbed the qualities of the weather or season, and thus are highly
_seasoned_, and they _pierce_ and _sting_ and _permeate_ us with
their spirit. They must be eaten in _season_, accordingly,--that is,
out-of-doors.

To appreciate the wild and sharp flavors of these October fruits, it is
necessary that you be breathing the sharp October or November air. The
out-door air and exercise which the walker gets give a different tone to
his palate, and he craves a fruit which the sedentary would call harsh
and crabbed. They must be eaten in the fields, when your system is all
aglow with exercise, when the frosty weather nips your fingers, the wind
rattles the bare boughs or rustles the few remaining leaves, and the
jay is heard screaming around. What is sour in the house a bracing walk
makes sweet. Some of these apples might be labelled, "To be eaten in the
wind."

Of course no flavors are thrown away; they are intended for the taste
that is up to them. Some apples have two distinct flavors, and perhaps
one-half of them must be eaten in the house, the other out-doors. One
Peter Whitney wrote from Northborough in 1782, for the Proceedings of
the Boston Academy, describing an apple-tree in that town "producing
fruit of opposite qualities, part of the same apple being frequently
sour and the other sweet;" also some all sour, and others all sweet, and
this diversity on all parts of the tree.

There is a wild apple on Nawshawtuct Hill in my town which has to me a
peculiarly pleasant bitter tang, not perceived till it is three-quarters
tasted. It remains on the tongue. As you eat it, it smells exactly like
a squash-bug. It is a sort of triumph to eat and relish it.

I hear that the fruit of a kind of plum-tree in Provence is "called
_Prunes sibarelles_, because it is impossible to whistle after having
eaten them, from their sourness." But perhaps they were only eaten
in the house and in summer, and if tried out-of-doors in a stinging
atmosphere, who knows but you could whistle an octave higher and
clearer?

In the fields only are the sours and bitters of Nature appreciated; just
as the wood-chopper eats his meal in a sunny glade, in the middle of
a winter day, with content, basks in a sunny ray there and dreams of
summer in a degree of cold which, experienced in a chamber, would make a
student miserable. They who are at work abroad are not cold, but rather
it is they who sit shivering in houses. As with temperatures, so with
flavors; as with cold and heat, so with sour and sweet. This natural
raciness, the sours and bitters which the diseased palate refuses, are
the true condiments.

Let your condiments be in the condition of your senses. To appreciate
the flavor of these wild apples requires vigorous and healthy senses,
_papillae_ firm and erect on the tongue and palate, not easily flattened
and tamed.

From my experience with wild apples, I can understand that there may be
reason for a savage's preferring many kinds of food which the civilized
man rejects. The former has the palate of an out-door man. It takes a
savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit.

What a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes to relish the apple of
life, the apple of the world, then!

"Nor is it every apple I desire,
Nor that which pleases every palate best;
'T is not the lasting Deuxan I require,
Nor yet the red-cheeked Greening I request,
Nor that which first beshrewed the name of
wife,
Nor that whose beauty caused the golden
strife:
No, no! bring me an apple from the tree of
life!"

So there is one thought for the field, another for the house. I would
have my thoughts, like wild apples, to be food for walkers, and will not
warrant them to be palatable, if tasted in the house.

THEIR BEAUTY.

Almost all wild apples are handsome. They cannot be too gnarly and
crabbed and rusty to look at. The gnarliest will have some redeeming
traits even to the eye. You will discover some evening redness dashed or
sprinkled on some protuberance or in some cavity. It is rare that the
summer lets an apple go without streaking or spotting it on some part of
its sphere. It will have some red stains, commemorating the mornings and
evenings it has witnessed; some dark and rusty blotches, in memory of
the clouds and foggy, mildewy days that have passed over it; and a
spacious field of green reflecting the general face of Nature,--green
even as the fields; or a yellow ground, which implies a milder
flavor,--yellow as the harvest, or russet as the hills.

Apples, these I mean, unspeakably fair,--apples not of Discord, but
of Concord! Yet not so rare but that the homeliest may have a share.
Painted by the frosts, some a uniform clear bright yellow, or red, or
crimson, as if their spheres had regularly revolved, and enjoyed the
influence of the sun on all sides alike,--some with the faintest pink
blush imaginable,--some brindled with deep red streaks like a cow,
or with hundreds of fine blood-red rays running regularly from
the stem-dimple to the blossom-end, like meridional lines, on a
straw-colored ground,--some touched with a greenish rust, like a fine
lichen, here and there, with crimson blotches or eyes more or less
confluent and fiery when wet,--and others gnarly, and freckled or
peppered all over on the stem side with fine crimson spots on a white
ground, as if accidentally sprinkled from the brush of Him who paints
the autumn leaves. Others, again, are sometimes red inside, perfused
with a beautiful blush, fairy food, too beautiful to eat,--apple of the
Hesperides, apple of the evening sky! But like shells and pebbles on the
sea-shore, they must be seen as they sparkle amid the withering leaves
in some dell in the woods, in the autumnal air, or as they lie in the
wet grass, and not when they have wilted and faded in the house.

THE NAMING OF THEM.

It would be a pleasant pastime to find suitable names for the hundred
varieties which go to a single heap at the cider-mill. Would it not
tax a man's invention,--no one to be named after a man, and all in the
_lingua vernacula_? Who shall stand godfather at the christening of the
wild apples? It would exhaust the Latin and Greek languages, if they
were used, and make the _lingua vernacula_ flag. We should have to call
in the sunrise and the sunset, the rainbow and the autumn woods and the
wild flowers, and the woodpecker and the purple finch and the squirrel
and the jay and the butterfly, the November traveller and the truant
boy, to our aid.

In 1836 there were in the garden of the London Horticultural Society
more than fourteen hundred distinct sorts. But here are species which
they have not in their catalogue, not to mention the varieties which our
Crab might yield to cultivation.

Let us enumerate a few of these. I find myself compelled, after all, to
give the Latin names of some for the benefit of those who live where
English is not spoken,--for they are likely to have a world-wide
reputation.

There is, first of all, the Wood-Apple (_Malus sylvatica_); the Blue-Jay
Apple; the Apple which grows in Dells in the Woods, (_sylvestrivallis,_)
also in Hollows in Pastures (_campestrivallis_); the Apple that grows
in an old Cellar-Hole (_Malus cellaris_); the Meadow-Apple; the
Partridge-Apple; the Truant's Apple, (_Cessaloris,_) which no boy will
ever go by without knocking off some, however _late_ it may be; the
Saunterer's Apple,--you must lose yourself before you can find the way
to that; the Beauty of the Air (_Decus Aeris_); December-Eating; the
Frozen-Thawed, (_gelato-soluta_) good only in that state; the Concord
Apple, possibly the same with the _Musketaquidensis_; the Assabet Apple;
the Brindled Apple; Wine of New England; the Chickaree Apple; the Green
Apple (_Malus viridis_);--this has many synonymes; in an imperfect
state, it is the _Cholera morbifera aut dysenterifera, puerulis
dilectissima;_--the Apple which Atalanta stopped to pick up; the
Hedge-Apple (_Malus Sepium_); the Slug-Apple (_limacea_); the
Railroad-Apple, which perhaps came from a core thrown out of the cars;
the Apple whose Fruit we tasted in our Youth; our Particular Apple, not
to be found in any catalogue,--_Pedestrium Solatium_; also the Apple
where hangs the Forgotten Scythe; Iduna's Apples, and the Apples which
Loki found in the Wood; and a great many more I have on my list, too
numerous to mention,--all of them good. As Bodaeus exclaims, referring
to the cultivated kinds, and adapting Virgil to his case, so I, adapting
Bodaeus,--

"Not if I had a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths,
An iron voice, could I describe all the forms
And reckon up all the names of these _wild apples_."

THE LAST GLEANING.

By the middle of November the wild apples have lost some of their
brilliancy, and have chiefly fallen. A great part are decayed on the
ground, and the sound ones are more palatable than before. The note
of the chickadee sounds now more distinct, as you wander amid the old
trees, and the autumnal dandelion is half-closed and tearful. But still,
if you are a skilful gleaner, you may get many a pocket-full even of
grafted fruit, long after apples are supposed to be gone out-of-doors. I
know a Blue-Pearmain tree, growing within the edge of a swamp, almost as
good as wild. You would not suppose that there was any fruit left there,
on the first survey, but you must look according to system. Those which
lie exposed are quite brown and rotten now, or perchance a few
still show one blooming cheek here and there amid the wet leaves.
Nevertheless, with experienced eyes, I explore amid the bare alders and
the huckleberry-bushes and the withered sedge, and in the crevices
of the rocks, which are full of leaves, and pry under the fallen and
decaying ferns, which, with apple and alder leaves, thickly strew the
ground. For I know that they lie concealed, fallen into hollows long
since and covered up by the leaves of the tree itself,--a proper kind of
packing. From these lurking-places, anywhere within the circumference of
the tree, I draw forth the fruit, all wet and glossy, maybe nibbled by
rabbits and hollowed out by crickets and perhaps with a leaf or two
cemented to it, (as Curzon an old manuscript from a monastery's mouldy
cellar,) but still with a rich bloom on it, and at least as ripe and
well kept, if not better than those in barrels, more crisp and lively
than they. If these resources fail to yield anything, I have learned to
look between the bases of the suckers which spring thickly from some
horizontal limb, for now and then one lodges there, or in the very midst
of an alder-clump, where they are covered by leaves, safe from cows
which may have smelled them out. If I am sharp-set, for I do not refuse
the Blue-Pearmain, I fill my pockets on each side; and as I retrace my
steps in the frosty eve, being perhaps four or five miles from home, I
eat one first from this side, and then from that, to keep my balance.

I learn from Topsell's Gesner, whose authority appears to be Albertus,
that the following is the way in which the hedgehog collects and carries
home his apples. He says,--"His meat is apples, worms, or grapes: when
he findeth apples or grapes on the earth, he rolleth himself upon them,
until he have filled all his prickles, and then carrieth them home to
his den, never bearing above one in his mouth; and if it fortune that
one of them fall off by the way, he likewise shaketh off all the
residue, and walloweth upon them afresh, until they be all settled upon
his back again. So, forth he goeth, making a noise like a cart-wheel;
and if he have any young ones in his nest, they pull off his load
wherewithal he is loaded, eating thereof what they please, and laying up
the residue for the time to come."

THE "FROZEN-THAWED" APPLE.

Toward the end of November, though some of the sound ones are yet more
mellow and perhaps more edible, they have generally, like the leaves,
lost their beauty, and are beginning to freeze. It is finger-cold, and
prudent farmers get in their barrelled apples, and bring you the apples
and cider which they have engaged; for it is time to put them into the
cellar. Perhaps a few on the ground show their red cheeks above the
early snow, and occasionally some even preserve their color and
soundness under the snow throughout the winter. But generally at the
beginning of the winter they freeze hard, and soon, though undecayed,
acquire the color of a baked apple.

Before the end of December, generally, they experience their first
thawing. Those which a month ago were sour, crabbed, and quite
unpalatable to the civilized taste, such at least as were frozen while
sound, let a warmer sun come to thaw them, for they are extremely
sensitive to its rays, are found to be filled with a rich sweet cider,
better than any bottled cider that I know of, and with which I am better
acquainted than with wine. All apples are good in this state, and your
jaws are the cider-press. Others, which have more substance, are a sweet
and luscious food,--in my opinion of more worth than the pine-apples
which are imported from the West Indies. Those which lately even I
tasted only to repent of it,--for I am semi-civilized,--which the farmer
willingly left on the tree, I am now glad to find have the property of
hanging on like the leaves of the young oaks. It is a way to keep cider
sweet without boiling. Let the frost come to freeze them first, solid as
stones, and then the rain or a warm winter day to thaw them, and they
will seem to have borrowed a flavor from heaven through the medium of
the air in which they hang. Or perchance you find, when you get home,
that those which rattled in your pocket have thawed, and the ice is
turned to cider. But after the third or fourth freezing and thawing they
will not be found so good.

What are the imported half-ripe fruits of the torrid South, to this
fruit matured by the cold of the frigid North? These are those crabbed
apples with which I cheated my companion, and kept a smooth face that
I might tempt him to eat. Now we both greedily fill our pockets
with them,--bending to drink the cup and save our lappets from the
overflowing juice,--and grow more social with their wine. Was there one
that hung so high and sheltered by the tangled branches that our sticks
could not dislodge it?

It is a fruit never carried to market, that I am aware of,--quite
distinct from the apple of the markets, as from dried apple and
cider,--and it is not every winter that produces it in perfection.

* * * * *

The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past. It is a fruit which will
probably become extinct in New England. You may still wander through old
orchards of native fruit of great extent, which for the most part went
to the cider-mill, now all gone to decay. I have heard of an orchard in
a distant town, on the side of a hill, where the apples rolled down and
lay four feet deep against a wall on the lower side, and this the owner
cut down for fear they should be made into cider. Since the temperance
reform and the general introduction of grafted fruit, no native
apple-trees, such as I see everywhere in deserted pastures, and where
the woods have grown up around them, are set out. I fear that he who
walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of
knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man, there are many pleasures which
he will not know! Notwithstanding the prevalence of the Baldwin and the
Porter, I doubt if so extensive orchards are set out to-day in my town
as there were a century ago, when those vast straggling cider-orchards
were planted, when men both ate and drank apples, when the pomace-heap
was the only nursery, and trees cost nothing but the trouble of setting
them out. Men could afford then to stick a tree by every wall-side and
let it take its chance. I see nobody planting trees to-day in such
out-of-the-way places, along the lonely roads and lanes, and at the
bottom of dells in the wood. Now that they have grafted trees, and pay a
price for them, they collect them into a plat by their houses, and fence
them in,--and the end of it all will be that we shall be compelled to
look for our apples in a barrel.

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