Easy Peasy Crabapples

There are few ornamental trees that cause many headaches for their owners as crabapples. Indeed, crabapples make you pay for their beautiful but brief flowering by catching all kinds of diseases and insects, including apple scab, a very unpleasant disease that leaves marks on leaves and fruit and which, in a really bad year, cause the tree to drop almost all its foliage in midsummer. That’s why many owners crabapple feel compelled to spray their crabapples with pesticides several times a year. But there is good news: there are now crabapples that are highly resistant to the most common apple diseases (mildew, blight, rust and scab) and are quite resistant to insects as well. Here is a short list: all the varieties named have resistance ranging from good to excellent (explanation below) for all four diseases.

Malus ‘Adams’

M. ‘Adirondack’

M. American Spirit™ (‘Amerspirzam’)

M. baccata ‘Jackii’

M. ‘Cardinal’

M. Centurion® (‘Centsam’)

M. ‘Dolgo’

M. ‘Donald Wyman’

M. ‘Doubloons’

M. floribunda

?M. ‘Harvest Gold’

 M. ‘Henry Kohankie’

M. ‘Liset’

M. ‘Lollipop’

M. ‘Madonna’

M. ‘Maybride’

M. ‘Molten Lava’

M. ‘Ormiston Roy’

M. ‘Pom’zai (‘Courtabri’)

M. ‘Prairiefire’

M. ‘Professor Sprenger’

M. ‘Purple Prince’

M. Red Jewel™ (‘Jewelcole’)

M. ‘Robinson’

M. ‘Royal Beauty’

M. Royal Raindrops™ (‘JFS-KW5’)

M. ‘Royal Splendor’

M. ‘Rudolph’

M. ‘Sentinel’

M. ‘Sir Lancelot’

M. ‘Snowdrift’

M. ‘Strawberry Parfait’

M. Sugartyme® (‘Sutyzam’)

M. ‘Thunderchild’

M. x zumi ‘Calocarpa’

Excellent resistance: usually no symptoms of the disease and no control measures are necessary.
Good resistance: occasional minor symptoms of the disease are present, but no control measures are necessary.