102 THE CRAB, ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND ASSOCIATIONS. 
delicately blended pink and white of the Crab blossom renders it still more exquisitely beautiful 
either collectively or individually than that of the apple.” Clare, the Northamptonshire poet, has 
thus feelingly alluded to the blossoms of the Crab :— 
“ Cares have claimed me many an evil day, 
And chilled the relish that I had for joy ; 
Yet when crab blossoms blush among the May, 
As erst in years gone by, I scramble now, 
Up ’mid the brambles for my old esteems, 
Filling my hands with many a blooming bough; 
Till the heart-stirring past a present seems, 
Save the bright sunshine of these fairy dreams.” 
Even the philosophical Lucretius could notice beauty in the appearance of Crab trees when in 
flower:— 
“ Quse pomis intersita dulcibus ornant.” (L. 5.) 
“ Such places which wild Apple trees throughout adorn.” 
thus showing that in Roman times there were parts of Italy where the Crab or wild Apple made 
an appreciable show. 
That some kind of wild apple has existed both in Europe and Asia ab origine is clear from 
various authorities, and its fruit must have been utilised from a very early period. The prophet 
Joel when he declares the destruction of the fruits of the earth by a long drought, mentions “the 
Apple tree,” among the “ trees of the field ” that are “ withered because joy is withered away from 
the sons of men.” (Joel l. 12.) So Solomon in the Canticles, derives a simile from the Apple 
tree “ among the trees of the wood ; ” though the kind of apple referred to may not be specifically 
the same as our Crab, yet it would seem to be one growing spontaneously in woody places. 
Wherever the wild apple was first brought into culture in aid of the wants of the human family, 
as it must have been “time out of mind,” it was in all probability in Eastern Countries. However 
it is clear from what Pliny has written in his great work on Natural History, that in the first 
century of our sera, the apple tree, as then cultivated, was considered of high value among fruit 
trees with the Romans. “There are Apples,” he says, “that have ennobled the countries from 
whence they came, and many apples have immortalized their first founders and inventors.” He 
here alludes to the process of grafting, which even at that time seems to have been well understood 
and experimented upon with various trees. Virgil in his Georgies, inculcates grafting, and on 
Pliny’s authority, no less than twenty-nine kinds of apples had been thus produced in Italy in his 
time. But it would appear that in warmer climates than England, apples are produced fit for eating 
without the trees on which they grow requiring any artificial process to improve them. Thus 
Thornton in his History of Turkey, says—“Apples are among the most common fruits of Wallachia, 
and one variety appears natural to the climate, as it bears without culture a fruit called domniasca, 
which is perhaps the finest in Europe both for size, colour and flavour.” 
But to return to the history of the truly native Crab of Britain. Although the Druids are 
reported to have had orchards in the vicinity of their sacred oak groves, this rests on no certain 
