Crab Apple
Crab Apple
Tree
The wild ancestor of the orchard apple — a small, often thorny tree with pink-white spring blossom and hard, sour little apples that feed birds and mammals in autumn.
💡 Fun Facts
- The crab apple is the wild ancestor of all the juicy eating apples we grow in orchards today.
- Its little apples are so sharp and sour that the word 'crabby', meaning grumpy, may come from their taste.
- In spring it is smothered in pink-and-white blossom; in autumn its windfall fruit feeds birds, badgers and foxes.
📅 Through the Year
- Leaf-out:April
- Flowering:April to May
- Fruiting:September to October
- Leaf fall:October to November
Name Story
Malus sylvestris
means “the wild apple of the woods”
What does its name mean?
- Malus — apple treeLatin mālus (with a long 'a')
- sylvestris — of the woods, wild, uncultivatedLatin silva, 'wood, forest'Decode this word →
Malus means 'apple tree', and this is Britain's own wild apple, growing in woods and hedgerows with small, hard, sour fruits. Here is a curious coincidence: Latin has an almost identical lookalike word, malus (with a short 'a'), meaning 'bad' — a different word that only happens to be spelt the same, which is partly why apples turn up in so many old tales about temptation.