The Complete Works of Count Tolstoy/Stories from Botany
STORIES FROM BOTANY
THE APPLE-TREE
I set out two hundred young apple-trees, and for three years I dug around them in the spring and the fall, and in winter wrapped them with straw against the hares. On the fourth year, when the snow melted, I went to take a look at my apple-trees. They had grown stouter during the winter: the bark was glossy and filled with sap; all the branches were sound, and at all the tips and axils there were pea-shaped flower-buds. Here and there the buds were bursting, and the purple edges of the flower-leaves could be seen. I knew that all the buds would be blossoms and fruit, and I was delighted as I looked at the apple-trees. But when I took off the wrapping from the first tree, I saw that down at the ground the bark was nibbled away, like a white ring, to the very wood. The mice had done that. I unwrapped a second tree, and the same had happened there. Of the two hundred trees not one was unharmed. I smeared pitch and wax on the nibbled spots; but when the trees were all in bloom, the blossoms at once fell off; there came out small leaves, and they, too, dropped off. The bark became wrinkled and black. Out of the two hundred apple-trees only nine were left. On these nine trees the bark had not been gnawed through all around, but strips of bark were left on the white ring. On the strips, where the bark held together, there grew out knots, and, although the trees sufiered, they lived. All the rest were ruined; below the rings there came out shoots, but they were all wild.
The bark of the tree is hke the arteries in man: through the arteries the blood goes to the whole body, and through the bark the sap goes along the tree and reaches the branches, leaves, and flowers. The whole inside of a tree may be taken out, as is often the case with old willows, and yet the tree will live so long as the bark is alive; but when the bark is ruined, the tree is gone. If a man's arteries are cut through, he will die, in the first place, because the blood will flow out, and in the second, because the blood will not be distributed through the body.
Even thus a birch dries up when the children bore a hole into it, in order to drink its sap, and all the sap flows out of it.
Just so the apple-trees were ruined because the mice gnawed the bark all around, and the sap could not rise from the roots to the branches, leaves, and flowers.
THE OLD POPLAR
For five years our garden was neglected. I hired labourers with axes and shovels, and myself began to work with them in the garden. We cut out and chopped out all the dry branches and wild shoots, and the superfluous trees and bushes. The poplars and bird-cherries grew ranker than the rest and choked the other trees. A poplar grows out from the roots, and it cannot be dug out, but the roots have to be chopped out underground.
Beyond the pond there stood an enormous poplar, two men's embraces in circumference. About it there was a clearing, and this was all overgrown with poplar shoots. I ordered them to be cut out: I wanted the spot to look more cheerful, but, above all, I wanted to make it easier for the old poplar, because I thought that all those young trees came from its roots, and were draining it of its sap. When we cut out these young poplars, I felt sorry as I saw them chop out the sap-filled roots underground, and as all four of us pulled at the poplar that had been cut down, and could not pull it out. It held on with all its might, and did not wish to die. I thought that, no doubt, they had to live, since they clung so much to life. But it was necessary to cut them down, and so I did it. Only later, when nothing could be done, I learned that they ought not to have been cut down.
I thought that the shoots were taking the sap away from the old poplar, but it turned out quite differently. When I was cutting them down, the old poplar was already dying. When the leaves came out, I saw (it grew from two boughs) that one bough was bare; and that same summer it dried up completely. The tree had been dying for quite awhile, and the tree knew it, so it tried to give its life to the shoots.
That was the reason why they grew so fast. I wanted to make it easier for the tree, and only killed all its children.
THE BIRD-CHERRY
A bird-cherry grew out on a hazel bush path and choked the bushes. I deliberated for a long time whether I had better cut down the bird-cherry, or not. This bird-cherry grew not as a bush, but as a tree, about six inches in diameter and thirty feet high, full of branches and bushy, and all besprinkled with bright, white, fragrant
blossoms. You could smell it from a distance. I should not have cut it down, but one of the labourers (to whom I had before given the order to cut down the bird-cherry) had begun to chop it without me. When I came, he had already cut in about three inches, and the sap splashed under the axe whenever it struck the same cut. "It cannot be helped,—apparently such is its fate," I thought, and I picked up an axe myself and began to chop it with the peasant.
It is a pleasure to do any work, and it is a pleasure to chop. It is a pleasure to let the axe enter deeply in a slanting line, and then to chop out the chip by a straight stroke, and to chop farther and farther into the tree.
I had entirely forgotten the bird-cherry, and was thinking only of felling it as quickly as possible. When I got tired, I put down my axe and with the peasant pressed against the tree and tried to make it fall. We bent it: the tree trembled with its leaves, and the dew showered down upon us, and the white, fragrant petals of the blossoms fell down.
At the same time something seemed to cry,—the middle of the tree creaked; we pressed against it, and it was as though something wept, there was a crash in the middle, and the tree tottered. It broke at the notch and, swaying, fell with its branches and blossoms into the grass. The twigs and blossoms trembled for awhile after the fall, and stopped.
"It was a fine tree!" said the peasant. "I am mightily sorry for it!"
I myself felt so sorry for it that I hurried away to the other labourers.
HOW TREES WALK
One day we were cleaning an overgrown path on a hillock near the pond. We cut down a lot of brier bushes, willows, and poplars,—then came the turn of a bird-cherry. It was growing on the path, and it was so old and stout that it could not be less than ten years old. And yet I knew that five years ago the garden had been cleaned. I could not understand how such an old bird-cherry could have grown out there. We cut it down and went farther. Farther away, in another thicket, there grew a similar bird-cherry, even stouter than the first. I looked at its root, and saw that it grew under an old linden. The linden with its branches choked it, and it had stretched out about twelve feet in a straight line, and only then came out to the light, raised its head, and began to blossom.
I cut it down at the root, and was surprised to find it so fresh, while the root was rotten. After we had cut it down, the peasants and I tried to pull it off; but no matter how much we jerked at it, we were unable to drag it away: it seemed to have stuck fast. I said:
"Look whether it has not caught somewhere."
A workman crawled under it, and called out:
"It has another root; it is out on the path!"
I walked over to him, and saw that it was so.
Not to be choked by the linden, the bird-cherry had gone away from underneath the linden out on the path, about eight feet from its former root. The root which I had cut down was rotten and dry, but the new one was fresh. The bird-cherry had evidently felt that it could not exist under the linden, so it had stretched out, dropped a branch to the ground, made a root of that branch, and left the other root. Only then did I understand how the first bird-cherry had grown out on the road. It had evidently done the same,—only it had had time to give up the old root, and so I had not found it.