The Apple-Tree The Open Country Books—No. 1   By: Liberty H. Bailey (1858-1954)

THE OPEN COUNTRY BOOKS

A continuing company of genial little books about the out of doors

Under the editorship of L. H. BAILEY

1. The Apple Tree L. H. Bailey 2. A Home Vegetable Garden Ella M. Freeman 3. The Cow Jared Van Wagenen, Jr.

Others about weather and the sky, scenery, camps, recreation, quadrupeds, fishes, birds, insects, reptiles, plants, and the places in the open.

The Open Country Books No. 1

THE APPLE TREE

BY L. H. BAILEY

NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1922 All rights reserved

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1922.

FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY NEW YORK

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Where There is no Apple Tree 7

II. The Apple Tree in the Landscape 10

III. The Buds on the Twigs 15

IV. The Weeks Between the Flower and the Fruit 19

V. The Brush Pile 27

VI. The Pruning of the Apple Tree 36

VII. Maintaining the Health and Energy of the Apple Tree 41

VIII. How an Apple Tree is Made 48

IX. The Dwarf Apple Tree 54

X. Whence Comes the Apple Tree? 60

XI. The Varieties of Apple 66

XII. The Pleasant Art of Grafting 79

XIII. The Mending of the Apple Tree 85

XIV. Citizens of the Apple Tree 89

XV. The Apple Tree Regions 97

XVI. The Harvest of the Apple Tree 102

XVII. The Appraisal of the Apple Tree 107

[Illustration: 1. The home apple tree]

THE APPLE TREE

I

WHERE THERE IS NO APPLE TREE

The wind is snapping in the bamboos, knocking together the resonant canes and weaving the myriad flexile wreaths above them. The palm heads rustle with a brisk crinkling music. Great ferns stand in the edge of the forest, and giant arums cling their arms about the trunks of trees and rear their dim jacks in the pulpit far in the branches; and in the greater distance I know that green parrots are flying in twos from tree to tree. The plant forms are strange and various, making mosaic of contrasting range of leaf size and leaf shape, palm and grass and fern, epiphyte and liana and clumpy mistletoe, of grace and clumsiness and even misproportion, a tall thick landscape all mingled into a symmetry of disorder that charms the attention and fascinates the eye.

It is a soft and delicious air wherein I sit. A torrid drowse is in the receding landscape. The people move leisurely, as befits the world where there is no preparation for frost and no urgent need of laborious apparel. There are tardy bullock carts, unconscious donkeys, and men pushing vehicles. There are odd products and unaccustomed cakes and cookies on little stands by the roadside, where the turbaned vendor sits on the ground unconcernedly.