User:HouseOfChange/Wild Apples

Wild Apples (essay) is a better title. "Wild Apples: The History of the Apple Tree" is an essay by Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862), published in 1862. Although he delivered a symposium with the title in 1860, the published version was completed as he was dying of tuberculosis, and includes events that happened in 1861. It is included as one of nine essays in the 1863 anthology of his writings Excursions.

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Thoreau's two definitions of "wild apples"
For most of the essay, Thoreau talks about wild apples he saw near Concord, Massachusetts, fruits from wild-growing trees of Malus domestica. He describes such trees as "wild only like myself, perchance, who belong not to the aboriginal race here, but have strayed into the woods from the cultivated stock."

Thoreau distinguishes between apples from seedling trees and those from grafted trees."I doubt if so extensive orchards are set out to-day in my town as there were a century ago, when those vast straggling cider-orchards were planted, when men both ate and drank apples, when the pomace-heap was the only nursery, and trees cost nothing but the trouble of setting them out...Now that they have grafted trees, and pay a price for them"

The essay also devotes a section to "The Crab," that is "a native [to the American continent] and aboriginal Crab-Apple, Malus coronaria.

Online text

 * "Wild Apples: The History of the Apple Tree" (The Atlantic November, 1862)

Printed sources

 * Wild Apples by Henry David Thoreau. (ISBN 9781429096195)
 * Wild Apples and Other Natural History Essays by Henry David Thoreau, edited by William Rossi. (ISBN 9-780-8203-2413-5)

Category:Essays by Henry David Thoreau Category:1860 essays