Please help me identify this tree!

9 years ago

I'm in Maryland and this tree is growing in our backyard by a small creek. It has pretty pink flowers and is growing towards the edge of the water. I think there may be more than one, and it is a few feet tall.

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Embothrium

9 years ago

last modified: 9 years ago

Flowering crab-apple. If spontaneous - as it sounds like may be the case - then unnamed seedlings without cultivar designations. Unless there is a possibility it is an intentional planting of vegetatively propagated (clonal) stock. Another variable is that Rose Family trees have a tendency to produce a percentage of apomictic seedlings, wherein the seed is actually generated by a cloning process within the tree - in which case seedlings can be clones of cultivars and therefore presumably entitled to their names. But I am not sure how often this happens among crab-apples specifically, if at all. (It is known to be rather prevalent with hawthorns and mountain ashes).

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Comments (11)

leemiller
Original Author
9 years ago
Thank you. It looks spontaneous based on where it is and the general lack of care that has been given to landscaping for the past several decades.
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wisconsitom
9 years ago
Fl. crabs now showing up more and more in places nobody planted them. IOW's, invasive tendencies are showing.

+oM
j0nd03
9 years ago
They can't be invasive if they are native, Tom. Colonizing might be more appropriate terminology. It doesn't have to be a seedling of a cultivar anyways. It could very easily be a seedling of a native species without needing to have arisen from a cultivar. I have a seedling of malus angustifolia in my yard and it is a gorgeous tree!
wisconsitom
9 years ago
Are these native then? I'd not seen that in the description, nor do I think OP would know. But...what I am saying...is that fl. crab has now become an invasive species in my state, the particular type seeming to cause the most trouble looking very much like the cultivar 'Golden Raindrops'. Nothing native about that. Nor, I suspect, the one in this thread either.

+oM
j0nd03
9 years ago
That maybe true in your case, Tom, but without a positive ID for the OP's tree, you cannot call it an invasive seedling at this point. It is misleading. All that has been posited so far is that it is a flowering crabapple.

/semantic discussion from me =)
gardengal48 (PNW Z8/9)
9 years ago
There is a difference between a plant species that has naturalized and one that is invasive. Any number of nonnative species have naturalized in various areas of the country but they are not necessarily considered invasive. Invasiveness only comes into play if the naturalized species threatens native plants or causes economic damage.

That's not to say that a naturalized plant species could not become invasive - many do - but the occasion of finding a nonnative plant springing up 'spontaneously' is not necessarily a cause for alarm.
wisconsitom
9 years ago
I'm not at all sure why we're having this side discussion. Believe me, I do indeed understand the many nuanced areas of discussion involving invasive/native/naturalized....ad infinitum, or nearly so! I read the OP to state that these spontaneously-arising fl. crabs were not native. Maybe they are, maybe they are not. But here's the thing: The number of naturally-occurring and fully native fl. crabs showing up in our ditches, hillsides, and waste areas is and will con tinue to be dwarfed by what is shaping up to be quite an explosion of invasive ones, from what I'm seeing. Most apples period are just not native plants.

+oM
Huggorm
9 years ago
Same thing here, I'm not sure I have ever seen a truly "clean" malus sylvestris in the woods, all those apple trees seem to have more or less dna from cultivated apple
Embothrium
9 years ago
last modified: 9 years ago
For me it's announcing itself as invasive if it pops up outside of cultivation and it seems to be the start of a colony, rather than an isolated individual that happened to land in an unusual situation that is permitting it to develop - like the one Japanese honeysuckle I found growing at the bottom of a south-facing slope just above a local lake, with sheltering trees and shrubs all around. And that at the time had not grown beyond its little warm, moist niche. Otherwise, I figure if 5 can grow in an ecosystem, then probably 5000 can grow also - and may be on the way.

Jacobson, Wild Plants of Greater Seattle - Second Edition (2008) uses multiple different designations for the different states of wildness that occur.
wisconsitom
9 years ago
I'm just making a wild-ass guess, and I will place a side bet that I'm right, lol, that this is an escape from cultivation and/or the progeny of earlier escapes. Of course I don't know for sure-I'm sitting at a desk in Wisconsin!-but I'm more than familiar with what the genus Malus has been up to. Starting to run amuck, simply put.

+oM