Photo: Laura Gaudette, CC BY 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Southern Crabapple

Malus angustifolia

Also called narrowleaf crabapple, southern crab.

A southern wild crabapple whose pink blossoms smell of violets in spring, followed by small, sour, yellow-green apples for jelly and wildlife.

Showy flowersWildlife valueEdibleBears young

Type: Small tree
Mature height: 20–30 ft
USDA zones: 4–9
Growth rate: Medium
Sun: Full, Part
Soil moisture: Average
Grows wild in: Stream banks, old fields and edges
Native range: 20 states and the District of Columbia, north to Pennsylvania, south to Florida and west to Texas
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Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia
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Southern crabapple is the wild crab of the Southeast, a small tree that suckers into thickets, with spur shoots that often end in thorns. It differs from the American crabapple in its narrower leaves, tapered at the base, and in its more southern range, from New Jersey and Pennsylvania to Florida and Texas. In mild winters it keeps some of its leaves. The Cherokee made jelly from the fruit, and the hard, heavy wood went into tool handles. Illinois ranks it critically imperiled at the northern edge of its range. Give it a sunny woodland edge or a hedgerow, for spring scent and late-summer fruit that wildlife eat.

Size, growth and what to expect

Southern crabapple grows at a medium pace, and our growth estimator gives it about a foot and a half a year. It makes a large shrub or a small tree of 20 to 30 feet with a short trunk and a broad, open, rounded crown. The national champion, in Maryland, measured 45 feet tall in 2017.

Pink flowers about an inch across open from March into May and carry a strong scent of violets. The fruit is a sour, yellow-green apple three quarters of an inch to an inch across on a long stalk, ripe in August and September. White-tailed deer, bobwhites, grouse, rabbits, squirrels, opossums, raccoons, skunks and foxes eat it. It also makes jelly, preserves and cider.

It grows wild in open woods, thickets, old fields and floodplains and on stream and lake banks, in sandy or clay soil.

How to grow Southern Crabapple

Southern crabapple flowers and fruits best in full sun, and it takes light shade. Give it a moist, well-drained, acid soil, like the valley bottoms and lower slopes where it grows wild. Keep it at least 500 feet from eastern red cedar, which carries cedar-apple rust. Set trees 12 feet apart, or give a single tree twice that. Keep each one 15 feet from a wall and 15 feet from overhead wires.

Saplings ship bare-root or potted. Plant them dormant, from leaf fall until bud swell, in a hole wider than the roots and no deeper. Set the root flare at the soil line, put the native soil back in, and keep the mulch clear of the trunk. Sow cleaned seed in fall half an inch deep in a screened bed. For spring, hold it damp in the refrigerator for two to four months first.

Water weekly through the first summer and in dry spells for two more years. Voles and rabbits strip young apple bark and deer browse the shoots, so keep a wire guard on each sapling for its first three or four years. Prune in late winter, mostly to take off root suckers and crossing branches, since spring cuts let in fire blight.

Its flowers are self-fertile, so a single tree can set fruit. Crops can begin within three or four years of planting and build to full bearing by the sixth or seventh year. It is very susceptible to cedar-apple rust, and fire blight, apple scab and canker can also strike. Scale, borers and aphids are the usual insects.

Heights and zones are typical ranges for the species in cultivation; local conditions and seed source shift them.

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