Apples

 [From April 13, 2008]

"...We fall asleep in a room fragrant with the scent of apples and pears, and when I wake up during the night I think for a moment that I am a boy again. For then my father not only had an orchard of his own, but purchased the fruit of other orchards....Every bedroom had heaps of apples on the floor, as well as those adorning the window-sill. At bedtime my brother and I had to pick our way between the piles of Tom Putts, Beauty of Baths, Orange Pippins, Bramleys, and the rest, all of which we could then identify by taste in the dark..."

- Ralph Whitlock, A Little Heap of Apples Under the Stairs, Letters from an English Village, Bradford on Avon




Francis Orray Ticknor (1822-1874) was a country doctor in Columbus, Ga., who wrote poetry and submitted horticultural articles to southern agricultural journals. This Ticknor poem is from April 1, 1859:

NANTAHALEE

A famous Apple

You’ve heard, I think, of the beautiful maid
Who fled from Love’s caresses,
Till her beautiful toes were turned to roots,
And both her shoulders to beautiful shoots,
And her beautiful cheeks to beautiful fruits,
And to blossoming sprays her tresses!

I’ve seen her, man! She’s living yet
Up in a Cherokee valley!
She’s an apple tree! and her name might be,
In the softly musical Cherokee,
A long-drawn "Nantahalee!"
‘Tis as sweet a word as you’ll read or write;
Not quite as fair as the thing, yet quite
Sufficient to start an old anchorite
Out of the ashes to bless and bite
The beautiful "Nantahalee!"