Planting the trees that would march and train
On, in his name to the great Pacific,
Like Birnam Wood to Dunsinane,
Johnny Appleseed swept on.

These lines come from Vachel Lindsay’s poem about the American folk figure Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman), the itinerant nurseryman who traveled through the early U.S. frontier planting apple nurseries. Lindsay, a leading early-20th-century American poet associated with performance recitation and populist themes, often mythologized national characters and westward expansion. In this passage he imagines Appleseed’s plantings as a kind of living army advancing toward the Pacific, aligning the folk legend with the larger narrative of American continental growth. The explicit Shakespearean allusion (“Birnam Wood to Dunsinane”) heightens the sense of prophetic, unstoppable movement.

Lindsay turns a practical act—planting apple trees—into epic, almost martial imagery. The trees “march and train” westward as if they were troops, suggesting that Appleseed’s legacy is not a single deed but a multiplying, self-propagating force that outlasts him. By invoking Birnam Wood’s advance on Dunsinane in *Macbeth*, Lindsay frames the spread of orchards as a fulfillment of destiny: what seems impossible (a forest moving) becomes real through human agency and time. The passage celebrates cultivation as a civilizing power on the frontier, while also hinting at the myth-making that converts settlement into heroic national narrative.