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The Siberian crab

Malus baccata

June

Even in a spring of exceptional blossom on almost every tree the crabapples have been standing out.  The Siberian crab in particular seems to have caught the attention of people who have hardly been aware of it before. One old friend called me in something like alarm and said there was a new tree she had never seen before across her pond. Sure enough the cloud of brilliant white was the wild apple from Siberia, native to a great stretch of central Asia from Lake Baikal to northern China. It was first planted at Kew in 1784.

The tree in my picture was planted in the 1950s beside the churchyard gate in our front park and must now be forty feet high and fifty wide, its lower branches dipping to the ground. We expect it to flower about the 5th of May (though oddly W.J.Bean of Kew early in the last century wrote that

it flowers in late April.) This year it opened its pure

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