Royalty Crab Apple Trees

Royalty Crab Apple Trees

Malus Royalty crab apples are excellent ornamental trees, suitable for an average sized garden, giving you rich, deep colours from spring to autumn. Its glossy, dark, purplish foliage keeps its pigment through the summer, unlike other many crabs that have colourful young leaves. The large, pink-red flowers really benefit from this deeply toned background, creating a very pleasing effect of layered, contrasting colour when admired close up, although from a distance the leaves tend to drown out the flowers.
The scarlet autumn display is magnificent, and then the dark red-black fruits continue to adorn the branches for several more weeks after the leaves fall. All in all a simply beautiful tree if you need some darker tones in your garden.
Ultimately, Royalty can reach a height of about 7 metres with a neatly conical, rounded habit. Older trees will spread if you let them.

Browse our variety of crab apple trees or our full range of ornamental garden trees.

Delivery season: Crab apple trees are delivered bareroot during late autumn and winter, approximately November-March inclusive.
Choosing a size: Small trees are cheaper, easier to handle and more forgiving of less than ideal aftercare, so they're best for a big planting project. If instant impact is your priority, or if you are only buying a few plants for use in a place where it's convenient to water them well in their first year, then you may as well use bigger ones. All our bareroot trees are measured by their height in centimetres above the ground (the roots aren't measured).

Features

• Height: 7m
• Soil: Any well drained
• Use: Specimen, small(ish) gardens, urban
• Colour: Purple red flowers in May
• Susceptible to scab
• Bareroot delivery only: November-March

Growing Royalty Crab Apples

Any well drained soil with decent fertility and moisture; it doesn't perform well on really dry sites without irrigation. Tolerant of pollution.

It makes a good pollinator in an apple orchard, but sadly is quite susceptible to scab, which tends to be a problem in the warmer, more humid parts of the South and West of England and Wales. If scab is a concern in your area, Red Sentinel is a better choice.

History & Trivia

This tree was selected in the 1950's from open pollinated seedlings by the Canadian plantsman W. L. Kerr, who was superintendent of the Dominion Forest Nursery Station at Sutherland, Saskatchewan, which closed in 1966.

Standard trees are measured by their girth in centimetres 1 metre above ground level: their trunk's waist measurement. Unlike sapling trees and hedge plants, standards aren't measured by their height, which will vary quite a bit both between and within species.
So, a 6/8cm standard tree has a trunk with a circumference of 6-8cm and an 8/10 standard has a trunk 8-10cm around. This measurement makes no difference to the tree's final height.
On average, standard trees are 2-3.5 metres tall when they arrive, but we cannot tell you precisely how tall your trees will be before we deliver them.