Many years ago I would spend much vacation time at a wonderful home in southeastern Pennsylvania. There my best friends who happen to also be my cousins, Judie and Beverly, taught me that apple trees are the preeminent climbing trees. Perfect climbing trees for children.

Apple trees are also great climbing trees for hungry bears. Bears that love my selection of apple varieties. Or perhaps they don’t even care about the variety. Maybe to bears apples are apples, whether McIntosh or Jonathan. To this baker though varieties of apples make a great difference. One variety or another can make or break a pie.

There’s another creature that regularly visits this apple tree climbing up and down its branches and trunk, the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker. Drilling sap wells to provide themselves and many other animals with phloem sap which carries the sustenance produced in the leaves to other parts of the tree. In the picture above you can see the small round holes, or sap wells, carved by the Sapsucker. The larger slashes in the bark have been made by a bear climbing the tree.

And here, something that pleases me beyond words. The Little One discovering that an apple tree is indeed, the perfect climbing tree.