Crab Apple

The European crab apple is a wild apple tree, small to middling in size and sometimes a many-stemmed bush, that may live eighty to a hundred years and reach fourteen metres. It grows across nearly all of Europe, lacking only in the far north and south, and on into Anatolia and the southern Caucasus, usually as scattered trees at wet woodland edges, in wood pasture and in farm hedges, and it is now rare and threatened throughout that range. Its branches are thorny and its oval leaves are often hairless beneath. White to rosy, fragrant blossom opens in May and June, and the small fruits, about three centimetres across, redden and fall in autumn. It crosses readily with the orchard apple, to whose genome it has contributed, although the cultivated apple descends chiefly from a Central Asian species. Kynes says Celtic myth counted the crab apple a fruit of knowledge, magic and prophecy, growing in Emain Ablach, the otherworldly Place of Apples, home of faeries and of Manannan mac Lir. The Anglo-Saxons used it in medicine; its English name is traced to scrab or scrabba, what eighth-century Vikings called the tree; and the fruit served in love divination and, eaten at bedtime with cucumber and cheese, was said to bring erotic dreams.