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 sieversii
Also called Cultivated Apple, Common Apple, Common Crabapple, Orchard Crabapple, Paradise Crabapple, Orchard Apple, Paradise Apple
Malus sieversii is the wild apple of Central Asia and the main ancestor of the domestic apple, Malus domestica. It is a deciduous tree, and the key to growing it is a sunny, well-drained site with a cold winter rest, as it is grown mainly for breeding and conservation.
Malus sieversii is a wild apple. According to DNA analysis conducted in 2010 that sequenced the complete genome of the apple, it is the primary ancestor of M. domestica, the domesticated apple. Its scientific name is accredited to Johann August Carl Sievers.
Native to Central Asia, M. sieversii prefers warm and damp habitats. Its conservation status is vulnerable.
These and other Malus species have been used in some recent breeding programmes to develop apples suitable for growing in harsh climates unsuitable for M. domestica, mainly for increased cold tolerance. A study in 2020 has discovered various gene inserts involved in dormancy and cold resistance features, such as heat shock proteins, in wild apples. In addition, desirable traits such as late flowering, early fruit maturity, short juvenility and stooling capability were studied by many breeding programs.
Malus sieversii has recently been cultivated by the US Agricultural Research Service, in hopes of finding genetic information of value in the breeding of the modern apple plant. Some, but not all, of the resulting trees show unusual disease resistance. The variation in their response to disease on an individual basis is, itself, a sign of how much more genetically diverse they are than their domesticated descendants. For instance, wild apples were found to have multiple blue mold resistant genes, specifically against Penicillium expansum.
Malus sieversii is distributed mainly within the Ili valley in southern Kazakhstan, where the damp climate suits its growth.
Pillar Apple · Southern crab apple · Sweet crab apple · Japanese Crabapple · Oregon Crab Apple · Hall crab apple · Chinese crab apple · Caucasus Apple · Plumleaf crab apple · Sargent's apple · Asiatic apple · European Crab Apple
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Malus sieversii 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.
