WILD CRABS 251 



oval fruit, of a golden color when ripe." He adds 

 that the fruit of this Oregon crab "is eaten by Indians, 

 and was used in early times for jelly making by the 

 white settlers." 



The wild apples of the Mississippi valley and 

 eastward have usually been distinguished into two 

 species, the Pyrus coronaria or garland crab of the 

 North, and the Pyrus angustifolia or narrow -leaved 

 crab of the South. Within the last generation or two, 

 botanists and experimenters have occasionally called 

 attention to these crabs as the possible parents of 

 improved varieties, but nothing very definite appears 

 to have been put on record until the present writer 

 made an essay in this direction a few years ago 

 ("American Garden," August, 1891), in which two 

 new species or types of Pyrus were proposed, and in 

 which an effort was made to discover the botanical 

 features of certain cultivated forms of them. At this 

 point we must examine the botanical features of the 

 two old-time species of eastern crabs, and of the 

 prairie states crab, which was there proposed as a 

 distinct species. 



1. The wild or garland crab of the northeastern 

 states (Pyrus coronaria, Linnaeus). Leaves short- 

 ovate to triangular-ovate, sharply cut-serrate and often 

 3-lobed, thin and hard, smooth, on long and slender 

 but stiff and hard, smooth petioles ; flowers large (over 

 an inch across), on long (1% to 2 inches) and slender, 

 stiff, smooth or very nearly smooth pedicels, the calyx 

 smooth, or very nearly so, on the outside. A small, 

 slow- growing and spreading, thorny tree, growing in 

 glades from New York to Michigan, and even to Mis- 

 souri and Kansas and southwards, probably, to Georgia. 



