No More Learning

No wonder they are prompted to grow
thorns at last, to defend themselves against such foes. In their
thorniness, however, there is no malice, only some malic acid.

The rocky pastures of the tract I have referred to--for they maintain
their ground best in a rocky field--are thickly sprinkled with these
little tufts, reminding you often of some rigid gray mosses or
lichens, and you see thousands of little trees just springing up
between them, with the seed still attached to them.

Being regularly clipped all around each year by the cows, as a hedge
with shears, they are often of a perfect conical or pyramidal form,
from one to four feet high, and more or less sharp, as if trimmed by
the gardener's art. In the pastures on Nobscot Hill and its spurs,
they make fine dark shadows when the sun is low. They are also an
excellent covert from hawks for many small birds that roost and build
in them. Whole flocks perch in them at night, and I have seen three
robins' nests in one which was six feet in diameter.

No doubt many of these are already old trees, if you reckon from the
day they were planted, but infants still when you consider their
development and the long life before them. I counted the annual rings
of some which were just one foot high, and as wide as high, and found
that they were about twelve years old, but quite sound and thrifty!
They were so low that they were unnoticed by the walker, while many of
their contemporaries from the nurseries were already bearing
considerable crops. But what you gain in time is perhaps in this case,
too, lost in power,--that is, in the vigor of the tree. This is their
pyramidal state.

The cows continue to browse them thus for twenty years or more,
keeping them down and compelling them to spread, until at last they
are so broad that they become their own fence, when some interior
shoot, which their foes cannot reach, darts upward with joy: for it
has not forgotten its high calling, and bears its own peculiar fruit
in triumph.

Such are the tactics by which it finally defeats its bovine foes. Now,
if you have watched the progress of a particular shrub, you will see
that it is no longer a simple pyramid or cone, but that out of its
apex there rises a sprig or two, growing more lustily perchance than
an orchard-tree, since the plant now devotes the whole of its
repressed energy to these upright parts.
In a short time these become
a small tree, an inverted pyramid resting on the apex of the other, so
that the whole has now the form of a vast hour-glass. The spreading
bottom, having served its purpose, finally disappears, and the
generous tree permits the now harmless cows to come in and stand in
its shade, and rub against and redden its trunk, which has grown in
spite of them, and even to taste a part of its fruit, and so disperse
the seed.

Thus the cows create their own shade and food; and the tree, its
hour-glass being inverted, lives a second life, as it were.

It is an important question with some nowadays, whether you should
trim young apple trees as high as your nose or as high as your eyes.
The ox trims them up as high as he can reach, and that is about the
right height, I think.

In spite of wandering kine, and other adverse circumstances, that
despised shrub, valued only by small birds as a covert and shelter
from hawks, has its blossom week at last, and in course of time its
harvest, sincere, though small.

By the end of some October, when its leaves have fallen, I frequently
see such a central sprig, whose progress I have watched, when I
thought it had forgotten its destiny, as I had, bearing its first crop
of small green or yellow or rosy fruit, which the cows cannot get at
over the bushy and thorny hedge which surrounds it, and I make haste
to taste the new and undescribed variety. We have all heard of the
numerous varieties of fruit invented by Van Mons and Knight. This is
the system of Van Cow, and she has invented far more and more
memorable varieties than both of them.

Through what hardships it may attain to bear a sweet fruit! Though
somewhat small, it may prove equal, if not superior, in flavor to that
which has grown in a garden,--will perchance be all the sweeter and
more palatable for the very difficulties it has had to contend with.
Who knows but this chance wild fruit, planted by a cow or a bird on
some remote and rocky hillside, where it is as yet unobserved by man,
may be the choicest of all its kind, and foreign potentates shall hear
of it, and royal societies seek to propagate it, though the virtues of
the perhaps truly crabbed owner of the soil may never be heard of,--at
least, beyond the limits of his village? It was thus the Porter and
the Baldwin grew.

Every wild apple shrub excites our expectation thus, somewhat as every
wild child. It is, perhaps, a prince in disguise. What a lesson to
man!