green. Fresh sprouts are in the sod.
By copse and highway the shad-bushes salute with their handkerchiefs.
Apple-trees show tips of verdure. It is good to see the early greens
of changing spring. It is good to look abroad on an apple-tree
landscape.

As to its vegetation, the landscape is low and flat, not tall. There
is a vast uniformity in plant forms, a subdued and constrained
humility. A month later the leafage will be in glory, but that also
will have an aspect of sameness and moderation. Perhaps the actual
variety of species will be greater than in many parts of the abounding
tropics, and to the careful observer the luxuriance will be as great,
although not so big; but as I look abroad I am impressed with the
economy of the prospect. It comes nearer to my powers of assimilation,
quiets me with a deep satisfaction; the contrasts are subdued, the
processes grade into each other imperceptibly in the land of the
lingering twilight.

In this prospect are maples and elms and apple-trees. The maples and
elms are of the fields and roadsides. The apple-trees are of human
habitations and human labor; they cluster about the buildings, or
stand guard at a gate; they are in plantations made by hands. As I see
them again, I wonder whether any other plant is so characteristically
a home-tree.

So is the apple-tree, even when full grown, within the reach of
children. It can be climbed. Little swings are hung from the branches.
Its shade is low and familiar. It bestows its fruit liberally to all
alike.

The apple is a sturdy tree. Short of trunk and short of continuous
limb, it is yet a stout and rugged object, the indirectness of its
branching branches adding to its picturesque quality. It is a tree of
good structure. Although its limbs eventually arch to the ground, if
left to themselves, they yet have great strength. The angularity of
the branching, the frequent forking, the big healing or hollow knots
with rounding callus-lips, give the tree character. Anywhere it would
be a marked tree, unlike any other.

The bark on the older surface sheds in short oblong irregular scales
or plates that detach perhaps at both ends and often at the sides,
clinging by the middle until the curl loosens them and they fall to
the ground. These plates or chips are more or less rowed up and down
the trunk and on the larger branches, yet the apple bark is not ridged
and furrowed as on the elm. The bark is not checked in squares as on
old pe