The Humble Crabapple

A welcome burst of color on a cold winter day, and especially bold in the middle of a snow flurry, nature’s food for winter foraging animals and a decoration for we humans to enjoy.

Before modern-day apples, the larger fruit we snack on today, all apples were what we now consider crabapples, small, sometimes berry-sized, often tart to sour, fruit. Humans largely created the modern apple by hybridizing for desirable traits, mostly sweetness and then size, others to ferment for fruit-based alcohol, and still others for their pectin in preserving fruits. The first list of desirable “dessert apples” comes from the days of the Roman Empire. Each region and country created apples through the ages that grow best in its climate. As humans moved around the globe, they took apples with them to regions like North and South America where apples are not native, and created species that adapted.

But for those who didn’t have access to hybrid cultivars, the tiny crabapples called “wildings” were always available in the woods, and always part of human and animal diets, found in Neolithic waste piles from the moderate deserts around the Mediterranean to the temperate regions of northern Europe and east into Asia, though not on other continents. Those small and twisted silhouettes covered with tiny five-petaled flowers each spring bore their fruits from mid-summer to late autumn, feeding the world along the way. Even the later, more sour apples weren’t wasted in a winter freeze—instead the frost and freeze tenderized the skin and flesh and developed the sweetness, with each freeze making it more edible, so these apples were available up until the time of the spring bloom. How’s that for a metaphor for turning adversity into a positive outcome?

Birds, deer and other winter foraging species forage for their food through the winter, but even this runs low before winter is over and tiny insects and young plants appear to help supplement their diet. As long as there area a few wildings around to provide apples for them, they’ll have both the fruit to give them energy and the seeds for protein, and we’ll continue to have the wildings they “plant” along the way.

I love crabapples, some even to eat as they are, but mostly to bake, like my favorite crabapple crisp, and jelly—crabapples have the best pectin I have ever used and I’ll often include them in a jelly just to use its pectin. This tree is not in an area of town where it would have been planted, but in a row of trees along the railroad tracks mostly populated by crabapples. No doubt birds landing there after eating from all the back yards within flying distance did a good job planting the varieties they liked.

I first read about the history of the apple in a historical fiction novel, and went from there to look it up and research it years ago. The information I have is in books, not linkable here, but here is an interesting article in an older magazine, now online: Simply… A History Of The Apple.

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