Willows and poplars have pods of a sort, but like neither locusts nor catalpas. The seeds are very minute in each family, and carried in delicate wisps of cottony down. The pods open by splitting down their walls, along two or four lines, curling back the dry segments, and thus letting the seeds escape. These trees are early in scattering their seeds. The true pod-bearers are late about it.
WILD APPLE TREES AND THEIR KIN
Go out into the woods, and you will find wild crab apple trees, bearing hard, sour little apples, unfit to eat. Four distinct kinds are native to this country. In Eastern Asia wild apple trees grow in greater variety than here. Our orchard apple trees are descended from these Oriental wild apples, which were brought under cultivation long before America was discovered. Nurserymen in Europe and Japan have for centuries worked with the wild species to improve them. The Japanese worked to produce finer flowering trees. European horticulturists desired finer and larger fruit. American orchards show how well they have succeeded. For over a century American horticulture has made marked progress. Many valuable kinds of fruit have originated in this country. Our own wild apples are now studied with the aim of bringing them into cultivation, just as the Asiatic species were improved centuries ago. It is a wonderful work, accomplished by crossing, grafting, budding, by fertilising, and good tillage,—processes too special to be explained in this book.
The taming of wild apples, however, is one of the great achievements of the centuries. Every boy and every girl who enjoys the eating of a fine apple will wish to know how such glorious fruit, in abundance sufficient to supply the world’s needs, has been produced from such unpromising beginnings as the gnarled little crab trees scattered through the woods, and dwarfed by the larger forest trees that overshadowed them.
“Grafting” or “budding” a little tree insures that the fruit it bears later on will be of the variety of the tree from which the scions came. Only once in a long while does a good variety of fruit come on a seedling tree. Plant the seed of the best apple you ever ate, and then wait a dozen years or more for this tree to bear fruit. The chances are ninety-nine to one that the apples turn out to be miserable, sour, or tasteless nubbins, like the roadside apples, that nobody planted. It is too expensive to experiment in hope of getting good varieties from seed.
“Johnny Appleseed” was a funny old fellow who wandered up and down the Ohio valley states, and planted apple seeds wherever he went. Queer, and perhaps crazy, he was a kindly soul, who dreamed of the days when orchards should dot the landscape, and be a part of every farm homestead. He did what he could to make the wild prairie wilderness blossom and bear fruit. No doubt many pioneer orchards came from his planting. Seedling trees, all of them, for he believed firmly that it is wrong to graft a tree!
Each year better and bigger apples are shown at fairs, and fruit shows. The history of apple culture is full of interest. It requires hundreds of books to tell the story. But any man who has an orchard can tell you how his trees were made into the varieties he ordered at the nursery. He may show you how grafting and budding is done, and how a tree may be made over in a few years to change entirely the kind of apple it bears. He may show a tree that bears distinct kinds of apples on different limbs, and show you the scar of the graft from which each new variety has sprung. When you are old enough, you can grow apple trees from seed, and graft or bud them to the variety you choose,—greening, russet, northern spy—taking your scions from a tree whose apples are especially fine. It is a fascinating game to play, with the soil, and the sun, and the rain all working with you to help you win.
Meanwhile, the wild apple, though worthless as a fruit tree, is well worth knowing. No well-fed orchard tree has charm to compare with this wild thing when spring transforms its ugly, thorny twigs.
The rosy blossoms of the wild crab apple come out of a multitude of coral-red buds which open just after the leaves. The gnarled limbs are bare and ugly, until late in May. Then the silvery, velvet leaves unfold, scarcely green at first, because each one wears so thick a garment of soft, white hairs. Before the leaves have lost this velvet coat, the flower buds begin to glow, and the tree top is soon blushing with the blossoms, and the air is full of their spicy fragrance.
