II The Apple-Tree in the Landscape
The April sun is soft on the broad open fenced fields, waking them gently from the long deep sleep of winter. Little rills are running full. The grass is newly coolly green. Fresh sprouts are in the sod. By copse and highway the shad-bushes salute with their handkerchiefs. Apple-trees show tips of verdure. It is good to see the early greens of changing spring. It is good to look abroad on an apple-tree landscape.
As to its vegetation, the landscape is low and flat, not tall. There is a vast uniformity in plant forms, a subdued and constrained humility. A month later the leafage will be in glory, but that also will have an aspect of sameness and moderation. Perhaps the actual variety of species will be greater than in many parts of the abounding tropics, and to the careful observer the luxuriance will be as great, although not so big; but as I look abroad I am impressed with the economy of the prospect. It comes nearer to my powers of assimilation, quiets me with a deep satisfaction; the contrasts are subdued, the processes grade into each other imperceptibly in the land of the lingering twilight.
In this prospect are maples and elms and apple-trees. The maples and elms are of the fields and roadsides. The apple-trees are of human habitations and human labor; they cluster about the buildings, or stand guard at a gate; they are in plantations made by hands. As I see them again, I wonder whether any other plant is so characteristically a home-tree.
So is the apple-tree, even when full grown, within the reach of children. It can be climbed. Little swings are hung from the branches. Its shade is low and familiar. It bestows its fruit liberally to all alike.
The apple is a sturdy tree. Short of trunk and short of continuous limb, it is yet a stout and rugged object, the indirectness of its branching branches adding to its picturesque quality. It is a tree of good structure. Although its limbs eventually arch to the ground, if left to themselves, they yet have great strength. The angularity of the branching, the frequent forking, the big healing or hollow knots with rounding callus-lips, give the tree character. Anywhere it would be a marked tree, unlike any other.
The bark on the older surface sheds in short oblong irregular scales or plates that detach perhaps at both ends and often at the sides, clinging by the middle until the curl loosens them and they fall to the ground. These plates or chips are more or less rowed up and down the trunk and on the larger branches, yet the apple bark is not ridged and furrowed as on the elm. The bark is not checked in squares as on old pear-trees nor peeling as on cherries. In dry weather, the loose old bark is dark brown-gray, often supporting gray lichens, but in rain it is soft and nearly black, yielding pleasantly to the touch. In the forks, the bark is not so readily cast and there the chips may lie in heaps. On the young limbs and small trunks the bark is tight and close, not splitting into seams or furrows with the expansion of the cylinder but stretching and throwing off detached flakes and chips. Under the chips various insects hide or make some of their transformations. There the codlin-moth pupates. The old remains of scale insects may be found on the exterior. In the furrows about the dormant buds the eggs of plant-lice pass the winter.
To destroy these breeding and hiding places, many careful apple-growers scrape away the loose bark, being careful not to expose the quick living tissue; and on the younger wood the eggs of aphis and other pests, as well as cocoons and nymphs, are destroyed by vigorous winter spraying. The regular spraying of apple-trees, in the different seasons, more or less sterilizes the bark. Many forms of canker, due to fungi and bacteria, invade the bark, making sunken areas and scars, often so serious as to destroy the tree. All these features are discoverable in the apple-tree.
The trunk of the apple-tree is short and stout, usually not perfectly cylindrical and not prominently buttressed at the base. In old trees it is usually ribbed or ridged, sometimes tortuous with spiral-like grooves, often showing the bulge where the graft was set. The wood is fine-grained and of good color, and lends itself well to certain kinds of cabinet work and to the turning-lathe for household objects; it should be better known.
If left to itself, the tree branches near the ground, making many strong secondary scaffold trunks; but the plant does not habitually have more than one bole, even though it may branch from the very base; it is a real tree, even though small, and not a huge shrub. In the natural condition, the trunk often rises only a foot or two before it is lost in the branches; at other times it may be four or six feet high. Under cultivation, the lowest branches are usually removed when the tree begins to grow, and an evident clean trunk is produced. In Europe and the Eastern States, it has been the practice to trim the trunk clean to the height of four or six feet; but in hotter and drier regions the trunk is kept short to insure against sun-scald; and with the better tillage implements of the present day it may not be necessary to train the heads so high.
In old hill pastures, in many parts of the North, one sees curious umbrella forms and other shapes of apple-trees, due to browsing by cattle. A little tree gets a start in the pasture. When cattle are turned in, they browse the tender terminal growth. The plant spreads at the base, in a horizontal direction. With the repeated browsing on top, the tree becomes a dense conical mound. Eventually, the leader may get a strong headway, and grows beyond the reach of the browsers. As it rises out of grasp, it sends off its side shoots, forming a head. The cattle browse the under side of this head, as far as they are able to reach, causing the tree to assume a grotesque hour-glass shape, flat on the under part of the head, with a cone of green herbage at the ground. Sometimes pastures are full of little hummocks of trees that have not yet been able to overtop the grazers.
The winter apple-tree in the free is a reassuring object. It has none of the sleekness of many horticultural forms, nor the fragility of peaches, sour cherries and plums. It stands boldly against the sky, with its elbows at all angles and its scaly bark holding the snow. Against evergreens it shows its ruggedness specially well. It presents forms to attract the artist. Even when gnarly and broken, it does not convey an impression of decrepitude and decay but rather of a hardy old character bearing his burdens. In every winter landscape I look instinctively for the apple-tree.
We are so accustomed to the apple-tree as a part of an orchard, where it is trimmed into shape and its bolder irregularities controlled, that we do not think it has beauty when left to itself to grow as it will. An apple-tree that takes its own course, as does a pine-tree or an oak, is looked on as unkempt and unprofitable and as a sorry object in the landscape, advertizing the neglect of the owner. Yet if the apple-tree had never borne good fruit, we should plant it for its bloom and its picturesqueness as we plant a hawthorn or a locust-tree.
In winter and in summer, and in the months between, my apple-tree is a great fact. It is a character in the population of my scenery, standing for certain human emotions. The tree is a living thing, not merely a something that bears apples.