WHEN people talk about ‘crab apples’, they usually mean those ornamental trees glistening with little fruit from which they make delicious jams and jellies in autumn. But all those apples start off as flowers and many of the trees that bear them are equally as attractive when they bloom in spring—and often even more so.
Botanists have a name for our native crab apple—Malus sylvestris—but it is seldom grown by gardeners. Most of the ornamental garden varieties are species, forms or hybrids from Asia and North America. There are some 40 wild species and hundreds of horticultural selections, all from the northern hemisphere, and immensely variable in their size, shape and beauty. Nurserymen tell us that there is ‘a crab apple for every garden’.
Bees love them, because they produce heavy crops of pollen. And all of
