Creative Woodworks & crafts 2005-04, страница 47

m

i

The underside of the leaf, depending on the species, can be wooly to nearly hairless, and in the majority of cases, fighter in color to nearly while.

continued on page 48

Apple trees are among the easiest trees to identify, whether domestic or crab, because of their shape, bark, leaves, blossoms, and in the autumn, the fruit.

Leaves are green on top, oval to egg shaped, with somewhat toothed margins.

and they have accidentally or intentionally been hybridized. The selections as to blossom color and fruit type arc nearly endless, allowing the landscaper wide latitude in property accents.

Then there arc the domestics (eating types). It is reported that eating apples as we know them arc not native to North America but were brought here by the earliest European settlers. They originated many thousands of years ago in Kazakhstan in the western Himalayas and have been used by mankind well before recorded history. While Native Americans have been recorded as harvesting and preserving apples prior to the arrival of the Colonists, they were using crab apples, ft is unknown who Hist began selective cross breeding to improve fruit quality and characteristies, but. the Greeks were doing it at feast 300 DC, a practice that continues world wide to this day.

Histor ic tecoids of the early Dutch settlers indicate that they brought seeds and seedlings to the New World prior to 1620, but had marginal success, a problem also encountered by the English when they arrived. The problem was pollination. Uoncy bees were not native lo the New World, and according to a local beekeeper friend, the English imported the first honeybees to the settlements in Virginia in 1622, and subsequently to the resl of their holdings. By the 1650s, the bee population was well established, a development of tremendous economic importance.

The hark is distinctive with a brown lo gray color with green markings, and scaly with flaking plates. 11 has been used medicinally to relieve fever.