Throughout the day, deer come to browse the fallen fruit from our mature crabapple (Malus) tree. The tree is at least 20 years old, has rough gray bark, has a round habit and blooms beautiful deep pink flowers in the spring. It produces literally tons of 1” diameter glossy reddish yellow fruit which I finally sampled and found to taste quite good. It is an excellent food source high in sugar for our local deer who keep our yard spotless of apples year round and it provides nectar for our bees and local pollinators in the spring. With 35 species of crabapples with 700 varieties, it is no wonder I can not quite identify it even after perusing Michael Dirr’s amazing: Manual of Woody Landscape Plants for awhile.
Thank god for the deer in our meadow! We used to have a crabapple tree at a house without deer and we literally filled bags with hundreds of pounds of apples- not to mention all of the yellow jackets the apples drew. No apples or yellow jackets with our deer family tending to the tree! (how in the world are there this many varieties of crabapples considering they are not really useful for fruit for humans).
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