Historic leaves, volume 5, April, 1906 - January, 1907

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A more distant outlook is over the roofs of houses and the masts of ships to the beautiful land-locked harbor and island studded bay. In another direction, where we had thought to see the massive pile of the new Court House, a steep, grassy knoll rises behind the scattered houses, which with their gardens lie between it and the road.

Let us enter the front gate of the nearest of these houses. An old gentle-woman and a child, perhaps five years of age, are walking in the South garden which lieth under it. They are none other than little Nathaniel Mather, Increase Mather's second son, and his grandmother, Mrs. Richard Mather, with whom he is spending the day. . . . They have a basket between them in which to gather fruit, and the grandam is telling her little charge that she picked the first apples that grew on that early tree, long ago when Grandfather Cotton lived there and was minister to the first church.

While we are in this hill garden, let us take a look across the basin of the Charles and see if we cannot perceive the outlines of another orchard lying in the edge of Watertown, which was planted about the same time on land which Simon Stone chose for his dwelling-place soon after his arrival in 1636. The old gardens on Beacon Hill have long ago made room for modern buildings, but one of the trees of the orchard in Watertown, a pear tree, is still standing in Old Cambridge Cemetery, twisted and gnarled by the storms of two hundred and sixty years. Until within a year or two, it has borne fruit, hard and knotty like its own trunk.

Tree vandalism is not a new thing, for in 1635 the town passed an order to ‘prevent the trees planted in the settlement from being spoiled.’ So tree-planting went merrily on, with as little conception of the great events which should take place under their branches a hundred years or more later as we have when we plant for the future on Arbor Day.

Of the other trees on Boston Common, the oldest are those in the Beacon street mall, set out in 1815 or 1816. This was the mall which Doctor Holmes so loved, where the Autocrat and the Schoolmistress were walking that famous morning when