…From the window of my study I look out on a sunny back garden, bounded by a steep wooded hill on the north,  and the spine of a long ridge of mountains to the south. An apple tree, now in flower, grows alongside the limestone wall in one corner of the garden, and honeybees hover among its blossoms.The place seems as anchored in eternity as the sky above it, but that's only because the things here have endured longer than living memory. 

     You don't have to go back very far to find newcomers that are now mistaken for original inhabitants.That old apple tree in the garden is one of them. Apples are not native to North America.They came here the same way my ancestors did-- on the deck of an English sailing ship. A couple of hundred years later, you hear people say, "As American as apple pie," because the origin of apples has mostly been forgotten.The honeybees buzzing around the apple blossoms are also strangers in a strange land.They, too, came over from Europe with the colonists, because they were more useful than the native pollinators, the wasps and yellow jackets, whose products were inferior to the abundant honey available from apis mellifera.