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Sweet Crabapple

Malus coronaria

Sweet crabapple perfumes the late-spring woods with intensely fragrant pink-and-white bloom, followed by hard green crabapples used for jelly and eaten by wildlife. A broad, often thorny native orchard tree. As with every apple, the flesh is the food and the seeds are cyanogenic — worth knowing when milling fruit for jelly, though the flesh itself carries none.

Family

Rosaceae

Type

tree

Lifespan

perennial

Height

15–25 ft

Spacing

15–25 ft apart

Light

part shade

Soil moisture

moist

Soil pH

neutral, acidic

Bloom

April, May, June

Bloom colors

white, pink

Wildlife value

pollinators, butterflies, mammals, songbirds, larval host

Caterpillar hosts

~308 butterfly & moth species

Landscape uses

naturalizing

Native states

AL, AR, DC, DE, GA, IL, IN, KS, KY, LA, MD, MI, MO, MS, NC, NJ, NY, OH, PA, SC, TN, VA, WI, WV