A Very Confused Crabapple Tree
I was walking across town on October 17, 2024 when I saw these beautiful blossoms on an ornamental crabapple tree next to the Meese Center.
Now, I want to take a moment to emphasize the date, and location. This was October 17. In Houghton, Michigan, latitude 47.12 degrees North. This is not crabapple blooming season!
To be fair, the whole tree wasn’t blooming, it was only a couple of branches while the rest of the tree was shedding leaves and shutting down for the winter.
Although, there were still some stubborn leaves that were holding on, mostly at the branch tips.
Mostly, the tree had its little fruits, about the size of a small cherry.
Crabapples are in the genus Malus, along with the domesticated apples. The fruits of this one were hard, kind of like domesticated apples are. They are edible, but tend to be pretty tart. This one was fairly puckeringly sour, with that dry aftertaste that a lot of fruits have.
Out-of-season blooming like this is rare, but not unheard-of. It is normally triggered by unusual weather, like droughts and cool periods followed by extended warm spells. And we did have a year of very unusual weather, starting with an anomalously warm winter with record low snow levels, and an early spring. We had already seen that for about 10 miles all around Houghton, there were nearly no apples, so something happened to stop our normally very prolific apple trees from setting fruit.
Granted, it was only the one tree. Flowering crabapples like this one are very popular ornamentals all around town, and while the rest of them do only have about a tenth as much fruit as normal, at least none of the others are blooming when they should be preparing for winter.
Reporting from the western shore of Lake Michigan that I saw a daffodil blooming this morning.
That’s interesting. I wonder if it is possible to figure out what it is exactly that is causing this premature blooming, and maybe use it to create a new set of ornamental flowers that bloom in the fall instead of the spring!