Wild Apples

Wild Apples is one of the last essays Henry David Thoreau prepared for publication. He delivered an early version as a lecture at the Concord Lyceum in 1860 and the finished essay appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in November 1862, just months after his death at forty four from tuberculosis.

The essay reads as a celebration of the wild apple tree, the kind that grows along New England fencerows from seeds dropped by birds or cattle and that produces fruit far harder, sourer, and stranger than the cultivated apples of the orchard. Thoreau ranges across the natural history of the apple, its arrival in North America with the European settlers, the wild varieties he had been tasting on his walks around Concord, and the broader question of what is lost when a wild thing is domesticated for human convenience.

Thoreau was one of the great American prose stylists and the essay shows him at his sharpest. He has the gift of mixing precise botanical observation with sudden flashes of comic exaggeration and quiet moral seriousness. The famous passage about the wild apple needing the open field, the bracing autumn air, and the long walk to find it is one of his strongest pieces of nature writing. The shorter passages on particular varieties he had named himself read as small portraits of strong individual character.

The essay is short enough to read in an hour and rewards a slow reading. It belongs alongside Walking, Autumnal Tints, and Life Without Principle as the late essays in which Thoreau brought together the various strands of his nature writing into a final mature form. For readers who know him only through Walden, the late essays are essential further reading. Wild Apples in particular has stayed in print continuously and remains one of the most readable shorter pieces in nineteenth century American nature writing.