The crab apple tree in the parkway by Wax Trax Records had me baffled. All winter this particular crab has thousands of fruits that cling to the branches through strong winds and ice storms. On days when the red berries are capped with snow and set off against a blue sky, the tree is spectacular.
They created the great fruit trick. Trees grow fruit for only one reason: to manipulate animals into spreading their seeds around for them. Oranges, pears, guavas are all elaborate ploys to get an animal to ingest the plant’s seeds and excrete them along with some nice fertilizer some distance away from the parent plant.
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The Wax Trax crab apple could drop its fruit as many types of crab apples do so it could be picked up by small mammals. But it doesn’t. So maybe it intended its seeds to be spread by birds. According to the book Attracting Birds: From the Prairies to the Atlantic by Verne Davison, robins, sparrows, starlings, and pigeons will all eat crab apples–though they’d all rather eat something else. The first three will go for insects and worms when they’re available. Pigeons prefer to eat seed or the disgusting loaves of soggy bread people throw on the sidewalk.
The Romans were the first to create a way to reliably reproduce the biggest and best apples. Left to their own devices, apple trees hybridize wildly. As a consequence, planting the seeds of a prized apple tree won’t guarantee another generation of good apples. As an alternative, the Romans figured out how to graft branches of the best apple producers onto other trees, which would then produce apples identical to the parent plant.
This wealth of genetic material gave rise in the 20th century to a fanatical group of crab apple lovers and breeders, who let the species hybridize like crazy and then grafted the results they liked to keep them true. Unfortunately most of the more than 900 taxa of crab apples that exist today were developed solely with an eye toward improving their floral display. No one was selecting for disease resistance, and the trees grew frail and fussy. They became the antithesis of the tough thorny trees found in the wild. As a consequence, for every person who loves crab apples there’s now someone who professes to detest them.
