Don't forget to look up for colors of May

Flowering trees are the essence of spring.

For a few weeks each May, trees that otherwise blend into the landscape explode with color and provide a backdrop for countless graduation photos.

City streets are at their finest when framed by branches bursting with hues of red, purple, magenta and white.

Perhaps the most popular spring flowering tree for home landscapes is crab apple. Flowers open around Mother’s Day weekend and stick around for a good two weeks. There also is an abundance of flowering cherries, pears and plums. Many bear fruit, though not the types you find in the grocery store.

Flowering plums are among the first to bloom. Masses of double-pink flowers appear before leaves. The bronze-to-reddish leaves are attractive in their own right. It often is used as an accent tree in smaller yards, topping out at 20 to 25 feet tall with a graceful fan-like shape.

Flowering cherry trees provide vivid color for many Washington, D.C., post cards. The Yoshino cherry is most prominent of the cherries around the Tidal Basin. Cherry blossoms are small, somewhat fragrant and appear before foliage. Blossoms range from bluish pink to white. A few cherry blossoms come in shades of rosy-pink, notably Kwanzan cherry. It grows in a vase-like form and can exceed 30 feet in height.

Another versatile spring bloomer is the crab apple tree. It reaches heights of 8 to 25 feet. Crab apples are widely used in municipal settings due to their tolerance to pollution and a range of soil conditions. Like plums, they are popular where space is limited. Crab apples have single or double blossoms and come in several colors, including white, rosy-pink, burgundy and reddish-violet. Crab apples are prized as an all-season tree because edible fruit holds on into winter, providing visual interest and a magnet for birds.

Flowering pear trees are an upright, fast-growing tree filled with white spring flowers. They are a garden center staple, especially among the big box stores. The standard-bearer has been the Bradford pear, prized for fast, upright growth, but also prone to storm damage. More nurseries are replacing the Bradford with tougher varieties, such as Cleveland Select. Foliage turns a rich, deep shade of burgundy in fall.

Spring Fever

These three spring-flowering trees stand out in the landscape and are relatively easy to grow:

Lilac (Syringa): Grows best in full sun in rich, well-drained soil. Blooms appear late spring to mid-summer. Grows up to 30 feet tall and 25 feet wide. Flowers come in shades of white, purple, pink to lavender.

Types of Crabapple Trees | Types of Everything

There are over twenty-five species which are indigenous to North America. The crabapple trees belong to the family of rose. One can easily distinguish the crabapple trees from the regular apple trees by means of their size. Different types of crabapples are used by the gardeners and landscapers to jazz up their rural or urban settings. Previously, these trees are not indigenous to the North America until they are made native by the process of cross pollinating between certain types of species.

Features

Crabapple trees are normally considered as deciduous trees which means that the foliage of all the crabapple trees fall during the fall season and new leaves shoot in the peak season. Crabapple trees bear the foliage having a shape like spear point, jagged with toothy ridges. In most of the species of crabapple trees, the flowers sprout in the late spring. The fruit of the crabapple tree can be found in different colors such as green, reddish, purple and yellow. The fruit is normally bitter or tart to taste. Unlike regular apple which are almost 2 inch in diameter, crabapple measured less than 2 inch in diameter.

Following are given some of the common types of crabapple trees:

Southern Crabapple

It is commonly grown in the regions of the Deep South and some parts of Ohio Valley. The southern crabapple tree can grow as tall as to 30 feet and has a trunk with a width of one foot. It produces very fragrant flowers which usually bloom in clusters of three to five. The apple is green in color with a diameter of 1 inch. The crabapple tree bears extend foliage 1-3 inch in length.

Geography

It is pretty common to see that several different types of plants or trees get their name from the geographical location where they grow. Same is the case with crabapple tree as there are many species of crabapples which are associated to certain regions such as the prairie crabapple found in the central states from Minnesota south to the grasslands of Kansas and some regions of Texas. Similarly, the Oregon crabapple is found widely alongside the Pacific Coast from Oregon north to Alaska.

Sweet Crabapple

These are the principal commodity of the upper Midwest, i.e. from Great Lakes south to Kentucky and from eastward to New Jersey. It has an oval-shaped leaves with broad, round base. Its flowers are very fragrant and of pinkish-white in color. Its blossom blooms to the width of 1 ½ inch. The apple of this tree is yellow-green in color. The tree grows well in damp, moist soil.

Ornamental crab apples

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