An old apple orchard is a fairy land indeed when blossoms cover the trees
Nothing tastes so good as ripe apples picked right off the tree!
Their charm is the charm of the wild rose. Their arrangement on the gnarled twigs is irregular. The artist loves the unstudied grace of it. The great botanist, Linnæus, probably saw only pressed specimens, but he named the tree coronaria, which means, “fit for crowns and garlands.”
I remember gathering the little green apples in the fall. Hard, and almost bitter, when eaten out of hand, they make a jelly that is as distinct and delightful in its way as the flowers are more admirable than common apple blossoms. The taste is wild, and almost bitter, but beside it ordinary apple jelly tastes insipid. Perhaps I am prejudiced, and the memory of that wild crab-apple jelly too remote to be depended upon. But many people agree with me. If you are in the woods in October, and come to a thicket of trees bearing flat, yellow apples, pick as many as you can carry home. Smell their spicy fragrance, and persuade your mother to make them into jelly, so that you can form your own opinion of it.
The Eastern crab apple grows over a large part of the region between the Atlantic coast, and the dry plains east of the Rocky Mountains, and south to Northern Alabama and Texas. The prairie crab, a different species, grows in the Mississippi Valley. A narrow-leaved species grows in the South, and the Oregon crab is the native wild apple of the woods, from California north into Alaska.
Quinces are core fruits, cousins of the apples. So are pears. All of our orchard pears and quinces are cultivated varieties of species that once grew wild in Europe or Asia. The Japanese quince in America is a hedge plant which in spring covers its bare twigs with large, deep rose-coloured flowers, and bears hard, freckled fruits that smell better than they taste, in September. We know all these fruits, and have them in our gardens, but they are foreigners here, though much at home. We have no native pears or quinces in America.
THE CHERRIES
Do you know the peculiar taste and odour of the pit of a cherry or peach? Then you will recognise it without difficulty when you meet it in a bruised leaf or twig of any tree that bears stone fruits, wild or cultivated. It belongs to the family which includes plums, cherries, peaches, apricots, and almonds. But one species of native cherry is a large tree. It is chiefly as fruit trees that the cultivated varieties are important. A few are grown for their beauty as flowering trees and shrubs; some for their rich bronze foliage.
The wild cherry is the one lumber tree in the family. Its wood ranks with mahogany, though not so expensive as the tree which grows no nearer to us than lower Florida and Central America. It is made into furniture or used in the interior finishing of houses, parlour cars, and ocean liners. It takes a beautiful polish, and has a rich brown colour that improves with time. It is largely used as veneer on cheaper woods. “Solid cherry” is likely to be birch, if the article is of modern make.