Lovely little tree just the recipe for Sweet Apple

I climbed aboard, and we went sailing up to the beautiful hill country where the Lawsons have lived all their lives and furnished apple trees to half the nation. James Lawson was in the field seeing a customer off. He said there had been no need for Mr. Bagwell and me to hurry. He had my tree planted in a great tub with good soil and fertilizer to see it through the summer, if I want to keep it near the house awhile before I set it out.

You never saw such a tree. It has seven kinds of sweet apples grafted to its slender grayish branches. Each branch has a bright identifying label, which makes the little bush look a bit like a Christmas tree. There's the papaw sweet apple, which Mr. Lawson says is a favorite in Kentucky, and there's the Sarah, and I don't remember all their names. One of them, we are sure, is the kind that grew at Sweet Apple cabin back in 1842 when it was built.

There are a lot of interesting apple lore stories - how certain varieties flourished and how they have been saved from extinction - and we stood awhile talking before we started a leisurely drive to restore sweet apple trees to Sweet Apple. I wanted to ride in the back of the truck, clutching my tree to my heart, but Mr. Bagwell set a deliberate pace, and the little tree was unscarred by the trip, although we ran into a cloudburst on the way home.

There were special compensations. We went by the Union Hill area and saw the Bagwells' garden spots - several of them, already plowed with white half runner beans, potatoes and strawberries in the ground. We visited their beautifully kept apple orchard and rows of muscadines neatly pruned as a May queen's garlands. And in the house among books and records in towering shelves, I saw Mrs. Bagwell's home-canned vegetables and jams and jellies and relishes and came home with a sampling of them. Best of all, I collected a package of dried apples from which she makes her superb dried apple pies.

My late neighbor, Mrs. Lum Crow, made wonderful fried pies. She, too, dried her own apples, and by the time I got interested in collecting her recipe, the price of dried apples at the supermarket had soared. Now with seven varieties of sweet apples coming along in my yard, I may take up drying a few for winter pies. I must get Mrs. Bagwell's recipe. The inspiring thing about the Bagwells is that their hard labor with the Georgia soil, where their ancestors settled a century ago, still produces a wonderfully rich life. Now I may take up strawberries as the next Sweet Apple enhancement.