The Apples 



The Prairie Crab Apple (Malus loensis, Britt.) is the 

 species found from Wisconsin to Oklahoma. It has only recently 

 been distinguished from M. coronaria, which its flowers closely 

 resemble. Its leaves are shorter and oval in shape, with deep, 

 irregular teeth, and linings of silky white down. The dull green 

 apples are of good size, larger than the other native crabs, and are 

 not at all flattened. It is the woolliness of all the young growth 

 in summer that will chiefly distinguish this tree. 



The double-flowered form of this crab apple, Malus loensis 

 flore pleno, is one of the most beautiful of ornamental trees. Its 

 flowers are not so numerous as to overload the tree, and each 

 blossom, in its setting of green leaves, has all the delicacy of a 

 pink tea rose, exquisite in form, in shading, and in fragrance. 



The Soulard Apple (Malus Soulardi, Britt.) may con- 

 fuse us. It is a hybrid of M. loensis and the common apple, as- 

 caped from orchards — the trees that come from apple seeds and 

 are not grafted. Such are our good-for-nothing roadside " wilding " 

 trees, with gnarly fruit nobody can eat. 



The Soulard apple occurs locally from Minnesota to Texas. 

 It is large leaved and stout of stature, with pink-flushed blossoms, 

 like an orchard apple tree. But its woolly surfaces are often 

 roughly rusty; its fruit is a flat crab apple on a stout stem, larger, 

 sweeter and more edible than one expects it to be. Because this 

 species is hardy and disposed to vary and improve in the quality 

 of its fruit in cultivation, horticulturists consider it a distinctly 

 promising apple for the coldest of the prairie states. Several 

 varieties have already been produced from it. 



The Wild Apple (Malus Malus, Britt.), native to southern 

 Europe and Asia, is the parent of our cultivated apples. It is 

 the apple of classical literature, inseparably associated with the 

 growth of civilisation, and cultivated for the improvement of its 

 fruit for unnumbered centuries. Our orchard trees, which renew 

 their youth every spring in fuzzy leaves and fragrant pink and 

 white blossoms, are direct descendants of this ancient species. 

 Myth and folk-lore and written history all tell how this fruit, more 

 than any other — the simple, wholesome, uncloying fruit of the 

 north temperate zone — is interwoven with the life of the people. 

 Read in the Song of Solomon: "As the apple tree among the 

 trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons." And as a 

 symbol of exquisite joy attained through the senses, "the smell 

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