‘Yanyu Jiangnan’ Crabapple

Abstract

Ornamental crabapple is a multipurpose woody plant of the Malus in the Rosaceae's family, which is an attractive small tree or shrub with beautiful flowers, colorful fruits, and various tree habits (Rong et al. 2022). Ornamental crabapple is recognized as one of the "four unique spring flowers," together with peony, plum, and orchid (Xu et al. 2021). In the 18th century, crabapples from China were introduced to Europe and America and hybridized with native crabapple cultivars (Fan et al. 2023;Fiala 1994). Previous studies have recorded more than 1200 genotypes of crabapple germplasm (Fiala 1994), most of them with white, pink, and red flowers. There were few transitional color flowers under subtropical monsoon climatic conditions, in which the flower color changed from dark to light or from one color to another slowly.At present, nearly a thousand crabapple germplasms have been cultivated through long-term breeding and selection (Dirr 2010; Jiang et al. 2020), including many white and pink flowering crabapples with single petals