If you want an impressive flowering tree to add that perfect touch to your landscaping job around the home, you certainly can’t go past the crabapple tree. No matter where in America you live, crab apple trees give a unique and beautiful look at almost any time of the year.

Like most flowering trees you can buy, spring to early summer is undoubtedly the time when the flowering crabapple tree looks it’s best. The trees multicolored buds begin to open, revealing a multitude of brilliantly colored flowers that last for many weeks. As the fall months arrive, the flowers of the crab apple tree begin to disappear and the fruits begin to form. These fruits come in as wide a variety of colors as the flowers before them. Usually the colors of the fruit on the crabapple trees mimic and contrast perfectly the changing colors of the leaves for autumn.

Most crab apple trees begin to bloom between late April and mid May. It’s at this time that they begin to produce their characteristic flowers with as few as five petals, or as many as fifteen or twenty petals. Generally speaking, the more petals to the flower the flowering crabapple tree has, the longer the tree will keep that flower. But the longer flower does have a downside for the gardener. Crab apple trees that keep their flowers for a long time produce far less fruit during the autumn months.

Rather interestingly, the crabapple tree is actually part of the rose family of plants. If you examine the flowers closely, this relationship becomes much more obvious through the similarities of the flowers. But as its name suggests, the crabapple tree is still closely related to the standard apple tree. The major defining difference between the two is in the size of the fruit.  Crabapples are less than two inches in diameter, while regular apples can be any size larger than two inches in diameter.