[Illustration: The Spectabilis crab in bloom]
The states west of Kansas do not know this lovely wild crab, to which the botanists give a really euphonious designation as _Pyrus coronaria_. There is a prairie-states crab-apple, which I have never seen, but which, I am told, has nothing like the beauty of our exquisite Eastern native. This Western species lacks the long stem and the bright color of the flowers of our favorite, and its fruits, while quite as viciously sour, are a dull and greasy green. The great West has many other things, but we have the wild crab-apple.
Rather between, as to beauty, is the native crab-apple of the Southland, which is known as the Soulard crab. It is not as attractive as our own Eastern gem, a pure native possession, and one which our foreign friends envy us.
Curiously enough, our own fruiting apple is not a native of America. It was at a meeting of a New England pomological association that I heard, several years ago, an old man of marvelous memory and power of observation tell of his recollections of seventy years, notable among which was his account of seeing the first good apples, as a boy, during a visit in the state of New York. Think of it! the most widely grown and beautiful of all our fruits hardly older than the railroad in America! We owe the apples we eat to Europe, for the start, the species being probably of Himalayan origin. America has greatly developed the apple, however, as one who has looked over the fruit tables at any great exposition will promptly testify, and nearly all our really good varieties are of American origin. Moreover, we are the greatest apple-growers in the world, and the yearly production probably exceeds a hundred millions of barrels.
The curious story of "Johnny Appleseed" is given us by historians, who tell us of this semi-religious enthusiast who roamed barefoot over the wilds of Ohio and Indiana a century ago, sowing apple-seeds in the scattered clearings, and living to see the trees bearing fruit, selections from which probably are interwoven among the varieties of today. New varieties of apples, by the way, come from seeds sown, and trees grown from them, with a bare chance that one in ten thousand may be worth keeping. When a variety seems thus worthy, "buds" or "scions" from the original tree are "budded" or "grafted" by the nurseryman into young seedling trees, which are thus changed into the selected sort. To sow the seeds of your favorite Baldwin does not imply that you will get Baldwin trees, by any means; you will more likely have a partial reversion to the acid and bitter original species.