Flowering Crab Apple Trees – Spring through Fall Beauty

Although some crab apples produce valuable fruit, most homeowners grow this flowering tree or shrub in the landscape for its beauty alone.
A few become collectors and acquire several kinds with the same zeal and glow of satisfaction that comes from finding and possessing rare orchids, fine jade, strange seashells – or any lovely thing.

Flowering Crab Apple Tree Beauty in the Garden

The glory of the flowering crab apple tree is not in its utility but its beauty in the garden. In the spring, the color of its blossoms ranges from pure white through pink shades to deep red and purple red.

The average blooming time for one tree is about twelve days but this can be stretched if several different kinds are grown. The garden may start to bloom with the snow white Manchurian and still be blooming, five weeks later, with the rose-pink Bechtel.

Colorful Flowering Crabapple Tree

The leaves of the crab apple are also beautiful and various. Red Silver, for instance, has leaves that remain a reddish bronze throughout the growing season. Tea crab’s leaves remain green and the amazing and rare Tschonoski has leaves which change color in autumn to rival the rainbow in diversity.

Fall brings vari-colored fruit that is ornamental against the green or autumn tinted leaves. The fall decorative period may also be stretched. It can start in August when the white flowered Dolgo bears large crimson apples and end in winter when Sargent and Peachleaf crab still have fruit to offer birds when the snow makes their rations scarce.

Landscape Plans

There’s enough variety in color of blossom and foliage and size and shape of the flowering crab either in bush or tree form to make landscaping with it interesting.


Scale may attack some trees as well as borers, and some may yield to fire blight. Spraying with any of the well-known products will take care of scale. Borers, if detected, should be killed by inserting a piece of flexible wire into the hole or by shooting a few drops of carbon disulphide into it and plugging it up with putty.

Extensive pruning is seldom necessary and den Boer believes a tree allowed to develop its own shape is usually more attractive than a trimmed tree.

What a glorious garden one can have, both in spring and fall, with a collection of these flowering crabs.

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