Crab apple blossom

Crab apple blossom from an unnamed seedling 

crab apple tree in the Eco Garden

It's hard to pick a favourite flowering tree of spring time. Right now in the Eco Garden there are kowhai, magnolias, flowering cherries, amelanchiers, peaches and an over-sized ngutu kaka all saying – pick me! But I keep coming back to the crab apples. I love them so much I have planted some 15 of them around the Eco Garden. I love their simple flowers (some species and cultivars are scented) in spring, and their colourful little apples in autumn. 

Malus ioensis Plena blossom; and a young M. ioensis tree in
full bloom.

My favourite of favourites is the American species and cultivar Malus ioensis Plena. It is a selection of M.ioensis, originally made in Illinois, and chosen because it has many more double flowers than the wild type. Its buds are deep pink, then the flower opens to show palest pink (fading to white) petals. These are violent-scented, in an old-fashioned talcum powder sort of way.

Another American beauty, similar to Plena, is M. coronaria Charlottae, which also has scented flowers, and lots of semi-double flowers in pale pink and white. Neither tree has particularly profuse or ornamental crabs (usually just a few large bright green ones), but their autumn leaf colour is good. 

The other crab apple trees in my garden put on a great show of crabs, in red and orange. I especially like the almost triangular shape of the shiny red crabs on the NZ bred variety 'Ellerslie'.

While the crab apples are at the height of flowering in New Zealand, they are showing off their fruit in North America. A great place to see them in flower or fruit is in the Jennings Crab Apple Collection at Cornell University in upstate New York. This is a great collection of American and other species and cultivars. Alexy Sergeev, a visiting physicist at Cornell, took some great photos of crab apples in the Jennings collection in 2005. 

I don't know what hemisphere the crab apple tree in the picture below thought it was in when I photographed it three years ago on the Lincoln University campus. I have never seen a tree with so many flowers - and so much fruit - on it at the same time. I guess those fruits are not very tasty to the birds, or they would be long gone - like most of my crab apples. 

 
P.S. Crab apple blossom makes a fine bouquet for the second birthday of the Eco Gardener blog. It is a still rather a mystery to me who reads this blog and why, but I do know that there have been over 31,000 page views since it was launched two years ago, and that in each of the last three months the number of readers from the USA has been greater than the number of readers from New Zealand. Hence I thought it was only fair to showcase my American crab apple trees, and let those readers know how much they are appreciated Down Under.