Pleasant Talk About Fruits, Flowers and Farming

by Henry Ward Beecher

Nor is the tree unworthy of special mention on account of health and longevity. It is subject to fewer diseases than almost any tree of our country. The worms that infest it are more easily destroyed than those upon the currant or the rose. The leaf is subject to blight in so small a degree, that not one farmer in a hundred ever thinks of it. The trunk is seldom winter-killed. It never cracks. It has no trouble, as the cherry does, in unbuckling the old bark and getting rid of it. The borer is the only important enemy; and even this is a trifle, if you compare the labor required to destroy it with the pains which men willingly take to secure a crop of potatoes. Acre for acre, an apple orchard will, on an average of years, produce more than half as many

bushels of fruit as a potato-field,—will it not? And yet, in plowing and planting and after-plowing and hoeing and digging, the potato requires at least five times the annual labor which is needed by the apple. An acre of apple-trees can be kept clean of all enemies and diseases with half the labor of once hoeing a crop of potatoes. And if you have borers it is your own fault, and you ought to be bored!

The health of the apple-tree is so great that farmers never think of examining their orchards for disease, any more than they do cedar posts or chestnut rails. And the great longevity of the apple-tree attests its good constitution. Two hundred years it sometimes reaches. I have a tree on my own place in Peekskill that cannot be less than that. Two ladies, one about eighty years of age, called upon us about three years ago, saying that they were brought up on that farm, and inquiring if the old apple-tree yet lived. They said that in their childhood it was called the old apple-tree, and was then a patriarch. It must now be a Methuselah. And, not to recur to it again, I may say that it is probably the largest recorded apple-tree of the world. I read in no work of any tree whose circumference is greater than twelve or thirteen feet. This morning I measured the Peekskill apple-tree, and found that six inches above the ground it was fourteen feet and six inches, and, at about four feet, or the spring of the limbs, fourteen feet and ten inches. I am sorry to add that the long-suffering old tree gives unmistakable signs of yielding to the infirmities of age. The fruit is sweet, but not especially valuable, except for stock. I do not expect to live to see any of my other trees attain to the size and age of this solitary lingerer of other centuries! I cannot help reverencing a tree whose leaves have trembled to the cannonading of the guns of our Revolution, which yielded fruit to Putnam’s soldiers when that hill was a military post, and under whose shadow Washington himself—without any stretch of probability—may have walked.

I ought not to omit the good properties of the apple-tree for fuel and cabinet-work. I have for five autumns kept up the bright fire required by the weather in an old-fashioned Franklin fireplace, using apple-wood, procured from old trees pruned or cut up wholly; and, when it is seasoned, I esteem it nearly as good as hickory, fully as good as maple, and far better than seasoned beech. I have also for my best bureau one of apple-wood. It might be mistaken for cherry. It is fine-grained, very hard, solid as mahogany, and grows richer with every year of age.

In Europe, the streets and roads are often shaded by fruit trees, the mulberry and the cherry being preferred. In some parts, the public are allowed to help themselves freely. When the fruit of any tree is to be reserved, a wisp of straw is placed around it, which suffices. Upright-growing apple-trees might be employed, with pears and cherries, in our streets and roads, and by their very number, and their abundance of fruit, might be taken away one motive of pilfering from juvenile hands. He must be a preordained thief who will go miles to steal that which he can get in broad daylight, without reproach, by his door. One way to stop stealing is to give folks enough without it.

I have thus far spoken of the apple tree. I now pass to the fruit,—to the apple itself. The question whether it sprang from the wild crab I do not regard as yet settled. It is not known from any historical evidence to have had that origin. You cannot prove that this, that, or the other man, of any age or nation, planted the seed and brought forward the fruit. Nor am I aware that any man has conducted experiments on it like those of Van Mons on the pear, or those which Dr. Grant has made on the grape that is cultivated in this country, to show that it sprang from the wild grape of Europe. Until that is done, it will be only a theory, a probable fact, but not a fact proved. And, by the way, it might be worth some man’s while, at his leisure, to take the seeds of the American wild grape, and see if, by any horticultural

Sunday school, he can work them up into good Christian vines.

The apple comes nearer to universal uses than any other fruit of the world. Is there another that has such a range of season? It begins in July, and a good cellar brings the apple round into July again, yet unshrunk, and in good flavor. It belts the year. What other fruit, except in the tropics, where there is no winter, and where there are successive growths, can do that?

It is a luxury, too. Kinds may be had so tender, so delicate, and, as Dr. Grant—the General Grant of the vineyards—would say, so refreshing, that not the pear, even, would dare to vie with it, or hope to surpass it. The Vanderveer of the Hudson River, the American Golden Russet, need not, in good seasons, well ripened, fear a regiment of pears in pomological convention, even in the city of Boston. It may not rival the melting qualities of the peach, eating which one knows not whether he is eating or drinking. But the peach is the fruit of a day,—ephemeral; and it is doubtful whether one would carry through the year any such relish as is experienced for a few weeks. It is the peculiarity of the apple that it never wearies the taste. It is to fruit what wheaten bread is to grains. It is a life-long relish. You may be satisfied with apples, but never cloyed. Do you remember your boyhood feats? I was brought up in a great old-fashioned house, with a cellar under every inch of it, through which an ox-cart might have been wheeled after all the bins were full. In this cellar, besides potatoes, beets, and turnips, were stored every year some hundred bushels of apples,—the Rhode Island Greening, the Roxbury Russet, the Russet round the Stem, as it was called, and the Spitzenberg; not daintily picked, but shaken down; not in aristocratic barrels set up in rows, but ox-carts full; not handled softly, but poured from baskets into great bins, as we poured potatoes into their resting-place. If they bruised and rotted, let them. We had enough and to spare. Two

seasons of picking over apples—a sort of grand assizes—put the matter all right. In all my boyhood I never dreamed of apples as things possible to be stolen. So abundant were they, so absolutely open to all comers,—who went down into the cellar by the inside stairs instead of the outside steps,—that we should as soon have thought of being cautioned against taking turnips, or asking leave to take a potato. Apples were as common as air. And that was early in December and January; for I noticed that the sun was no more fond than I was of staying out a great while on those Litchfield hills, but ran in early to warm his fingers, as I did mine. When the day was done, and the candles were lighted, and the supper was out of the way, we all gathered about the great kitchen fire; and soon after George or Henry had to go down for apples. Generally it was Henry. A boy’s hat is a universal instrument. It is a bat to smack butterflies with, a bag to fetch berries in, a basket for stones to pelt frogs withal, a measure to bring up apples in. And a big-headed boy’s old felt hat was not stingy in its quantities; and when its store ended, the errand could always be repeated. To eat six, eight, and twelve apples in an evening was no great feat for a growing young lad, whose stomach was no more in danger of dyspepsia than the neighborhood mill, through whose body passed thousands of bushels of corn, leaving it no fatter at the end of the year than at the beginning. Cloyed with apples? To eat an apple is to want to eat another. We tire of cherries, of peaches, of strawberries, of figs, of grapes, (I say it with reverence in this presence!) but never of apples. Nay, when creature comforts fail, and the heart—hopeless voyager on the troubled sea of life—is sick, apples are comforters; or, wherefore is it written:—