Throughout the wooded regions, from the Great Lakes to Texas and Alabama, the wild crabapple brightens the spring landscape with its rose-colored, spicy-scented blossoms. The little trees huddle together, their flat tops often matted and reaching out sidewise from under the shade of the other forest trees. The twigs are crabbed indeed in winter, but they silver over with the young foliage in April. The coral flower buds sprinkle the new leaves, and through May a great burst of rose-colored bloom overspreads the tree-tops. It is not sweetness merely that these flowers exhale, but an exquisite, spicy, stimulating fragrance, by which one always remembers them.
The pioneers made jellies and preserves out of the little green apples (_see illustrations, pages 150-151_), which lost some of their acrid quality by hanging on until after a good frost. There are those who still gather these fruits as their parents and grandparents did. In their opinion the wild tang and the indescribable piquancy of flavor in jellies made from this fruit are unmatched by those of any other fruit that grows.
The genus _prunus_ belongs to the rose family and includes shrubs and trees with stone fruits. Of the over one hundred species, thirty are native to North America; but ten of them assume tree form, and all but one are small trees. Related to them are the garden cherries and plums, native to other countries, and the peach, the apricot, and the almond, found in this country only in horticultural varieties. The wood of _prunus_ is close-grained, solid, and durable, and a few of the species are important timber trees. The simplest way to identify a member of the genus is to break a twig at any season of the year and taste the sap. If it is bitter and astringent with hydrocyanic acid (the flavor we get in fresh peach-pits and bitter almonds), we may be sure we have run the tree down to the genus _prunus_.
The wild red or yellow plum forms dense thickets in moist woods and along river banks from New York to Texas and Colorado. Its leafless, gnarled, and thorny twigs are covered in spring with dense clusters of white bloom, honey-sweet in fragrance, a carnival of pleasure and profit to bees and other insects. In hot weather this nectar often ferments and sours before the blossoms fall. The abundant dry pollen is scattered by the wind. The plum crop depends more upon wind than upon insects, for the pollination period is very brief.