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Updated: June 2, 2025
At first the flower is as green as the leaves, but finally turns a deep red-purple. It grows close to the branch and is solitary. =May-Apple= One of the most delicious wild fruits we have is the May-apple or mandrake. It is finely flavored, sweet and juicy, but being a laxative one must eat of it sparingly. It is most common in the Middle States and reaches perfection in Ohio.
The flower is a clear white with from eight to twelve rounding petals and it generally measures about one and a half inches across. The petals expand in the morning, become erect in the afternoon, and close at night. We are told that the May-apple is a roadside plant, but I have found it only in the woods. =Wild Grapes=
The leaves quickly expanded, fresher than ever; the flowers uncurled and unfolded, the May-apple umbrellas raised again; and all seemed singing a song as joyous as that of the birds, though audible only to the nerves of eye and brain of the human beings who had thus witnessed another of nature's interior entertainments. How much we miss by reason of fear of a little wetting!
You've been on a woodland saunter, then, while I enacted Solomon's sluggard!" The worthy parent's eyes began to twinkle. "What flowers did you find? They have strange blooms here, and yet I warrant that even in these woods one might come across London pride and none-so-pretty and forget-me-not" His daughter smiled, and asked him some idle question about the May-apple and the Judas-tree.
The cooler air of night brought out the heavy scents of damp earth and leaves, and over in the deep grass a late May-apple spilled from its ivory cup the heavy odor of death. A bob-white fluted in the darkness on the other side of the road. Her acute apprehension had ceased. William King was so certain, that, had the reality been less dreadful she would have been ashamed of the fuss she had made.
Her rambles were unlimited, and each day she was rewarded by new discoveries and delightful secrets how the May-apple is good to eat, that sassafras root makes tea, that birch bark is very like candy, though not so sweet, and slippery elm a feast. Her new playmates were as lovely and perfect as she could desire. They did not "grow up nasty," but in the autumn, alas! they died.
While our young people seldom wanted for meat, they felt the privation of the tread to which they had teen accustomed very sensibly. The fruit of the May-apple, in rich moist soil, will attain to the size of the magnum bonum, or egg-plum, which it resembles in colour and shape.
Great colonies of umbrella-leaved May-apple are breaking into white flowers. The broad, lily-like leaves of the true and false Solomon's seal are even more attractive than their blossoms. Ferns, bellwort, wild sarsaparilla, all help to soften our footfalls, while overhead the light daily grows more subdued as the leaf-buds break and the leaves unfold. The throb of the year's life grows stronger.
Every county has its Theocritus who sings the nearest creek, the bloom of the may-apple, the squirrel on the stake-and-rider fence, the rabbit in the corn, the paw-paw thicket where fruit for the gods lures farm boys on frosty mornings in golden autumn.
The scar looks something like a wax seal and the man who gave the plant the name of Solomon's seal had probably read that tale in the Arabian Nights, where King Solomon's seal penned up the giant genie who had troubled the fishermen. Then there's the May-apple. Who does not remember his childhood days when he pulled the little umbrellas?
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