Plant
Apple
Tree
The familiar orchard apple — a cultivated tree descended from wild mountain apples, grown for its sweet fruit in gardens and orchards across Britain.
💡 Fun Facts
- Every orchard apple is descended from a wild apple from the mountains of Central Asia — about half of its genes still come from that wild tree.
- Apples don't grow true from pips: plant a pip from a Cox and you get a wild, unpredictable tree. So every variety, from Bramley to Gala, is a clone grafted onto a rootstock.
- There are more than 7,500 kinds of apple in the world, and most trees need a different apple flowering nearby so the bees can pollinate them.
📅 Through the Year
- Leaf-out:April
- Flowering:April to May
- Fruiting:August to October
- Leaf fall:October to November
Name Story
Malus domestica
means “the apple tree of the household — the cultivated, orchard apple”
What does its name mean?
- Malus — apple treeLatin mālus (with a long 'a')
- domestica — domestic, of the household, cultivatedLatin domesticus, from domus 'house, home'Decode this word →
Malus is simply the Latin for 'apple tree', and domestica marks this as the tame, orchard-grown apple rather than its wild relatives. There is a famous coincidence here: mālus with a long 'a' means 'apple tree', while malus with a short 'a' means 'bad' — a lookalike word that is often said to have helped fix the apple as the 'forbidden fruit', even though no fruit is actually named in the old story.