The Apples 



winter use. The jelly has a wild tang in it, an indescribable 

 piquancy of flavour as different from common apple jelly as the 

 flowers are in their way more charming than ordinary apple 

 blossoms. It is the rare gamy taste of a primitive apple. 



Well-meaning horticulturists have tried what they could do 

 toward domesticating this Malus coronaria. The effort has not 

 been a success. The fruit remains acerb and hard; the tree 

 declines to be "ameliorated" for the good of mankind. Isn't 

 it, after all, a gratuitous office ? Do we not need our wild crab 

 apple just as it is, as much as we need more kinds of orchard 

 trees? How spirited and fine is its resistance! It seems as if 

 this wayward beauty of our woodside thickets considered that the 

 best way to serve mankind was to keep inviolate those charms 

 that set it apart from other trees and make its remotest haunt the 

 Mecca of eager pilgrims every spring. 



The wild crab apple is not a tree to plant by itself in park 

 or garden. Plant it in companies on the edge of woods, or in 

 obscure and ugly fence corners, where there is a background, or 

 where, at least, each tree can lose its individuality in the mass. 

 Now, go away and let them alone. They do not need mulching 

 nor pruning. Let them gang their ain gait, and in a few years you 

 will have a crab-apple thicket. You will also have succeeded in 

 bringing home with these trees something of the spirit of the 

 wild woods where you found them. 



The Narrow-leaved Crab Apple {Malus angustifoUa, 

 Michx.), smaller in all its parts than the common wild crab apple, 

 but closely resembling it in all but its leaf, is found on the Atlantic 

 coast from New Jersey to Florida, and west to the Mississippi. 

 It extends also to western Pennsylvania and eastern Tennessee, 

 overlapping the range of the other species in these regions. Its 

 leaves are leathery, almost evergreen, dark and shiny, with dull, 

 often fuzzy linings. They are small, narrow, and blunt pointed 

 at both ends. 



The Oregon Crab (Malus rivularis, Roem.), a white- 

 flowered species with ovate, taper-pointed leaves, grows in dense 

 thickets along streams in the coast region from northern California 

 well into Alaska. Its young growth is covered with a grey 

 pubescence. The apples are oblong, rarely over f inch long, 

 and few people beside Indians consider them worth gathering for 

 food. 



286 



