The open plant encyclopedia
Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Malus niedzwetzkyana
Also called Cultivated Apple, Common Apple, Common Crabapple, Orchard Crabapple, Paradise Crabapple, Orchard Apple, Paradise Apple
Niedzwetzky's apple is a small tree from Central Asia prized for its red flesh, red skin and magenta spring flowers, and it is grown as a hardy fruit and ornamental tree. The key to growing it is cold hardiness and drought tolerance, with the fruit eaten fresh or used for cider.
Malus niedzwetzkyana, or Niedzwetzky's apple, is a kind of apple native to Asia noted for its red-fleshed, red-skinned fruit and red flowers. Some botanists consider it a distinct species, while others have argued that it is simply an unusual variety of the common apple. It is listed as an endangered species globally by IUCN.
Malus niedzwetzkyana has been used to breed some modern red-leaved, red-flowered, and red-fruited apples and crabapples. It is believed to be the ancestor of Surprise, a pink-fleshed apple that was brought to the United States by German immigrants around 1840 and was later used by the horticulturist Albert Etter to breed some 30 pink- and red-fleshed varieties, the best-known of which is Pink Pearl. Another horticulturist, Niels Ebbesen Hansen, encountered M. niedzwetzkyana in the Ili valley, where he also met Niedzwetzky, in what was then the Russian region of Turkestan (but now Kazakhstan) during his 1897 expedition. Hansen began two breeding programs based on this unusual fruit, one aimed at developing a cold-hardy cooking and eating apple, and the other aimed at developing ornamental crabapples. His efforts resulted in the Almata apple and the Hopa crabapple, among other varieties. Some of these apples, as well as M. niedzwetzkyana itself, are being used for small-scale commercial production of rosé apple ciders.
The species is native to certain parts of China, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.
Pillar Apple · Southern crab apple · Chinese Pearleaf Crabapple · Malus ×atrosanguinea · Siberian crab apple · Siberian Crab · Sweet crab apple · Malus crescimannoi · Malus doumeri · Japanese Crabapple · Oregon Crab Apple · Hall crab apple
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Malus niedzwetzkyana by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
