Thank you. It looks spontaneous based on where it is and the general lack of care that has been given to landscaping for the past several decades.

Fl. crabs now showing up more and more in places nobody planted them. IOW's, invasive tendencies are showing.

+oM

They can't be invasive if they are native, Tom. Colonizing might be more appropriate terminology. It doesn't have to be a seedling of a cultivar anyways. It could very easily be a seedling of a native species without needing to have arisen from a cultivar. I have a seedling of malus angustifolia in my yard and it is a gorgeous tree!

Are these native then? I'd not seen that in the description, nor do I think OP would know. But...what I am saying...is that fl. crab has now become an invasive species in my state, the particular type seeming to cause the most trouble looking very much like the cultivar 'Golden Raindrops'. Nothing native about that. Nor, I suspect, the one in this thread either.

+oM

That maybe true in your case, Tom, but without a positive ID for the OP's tree, you cannot call it an invasive seedling at this point. It is misleading. All that has been posited so far is that it is a flowering crabapple.

/semantic discussion from me =)

There is a difference between a plant species that has naturalized and one that is invasive. Any number of nonnative species have naturalized in various areas of the country but they are not necessarily considered invasive. Invasiveness only comes into play if the naturalized species threatens native plants or causes economic damage.

That's not to say that a naturalized plant species could not become invasive - many do - but the occasion of finding a nonnative plant springing up 'spontaneously' is not necessarily a cause for alarm.

I'm not at all sure why we're having this side discussion. Believe me, I do indeed understand the many nuanced areas of discussion involving invasive/native/naturalized....ad infinitum, or nearly so! I read the OP to state that these spontaneously-arising fl. crabs were not native. Maybe they are, maybe they are not. But here's the thing: The number of naturally-occurring and fully native fl. crabs showing up in our ditches, hillsides, and waste areas is and will con tinue to be dwarfed by what is shaping up to be quite an explosion of invasive ones, from what I'm seeing. Most apples period are just not native plants.

+oM

Same thing here, I'm not sure I have ever seen a truly "clean" malus sylvestris in the woods, all those apple trees seem to have more or less dna from cultivated apple

For me it's announcing itself as invasive if it pops up outside of cultivation and it seems to be the start of a colony, rather than an isolated individual that happened to land in an unusual situation that is permitting it to develop - like the one Japanese honeysuckle I found growing at the bottom of a south-facing slope just above a local lake, with sheltering trees and shrubs all around. And that at the time had not grown beyond its little warm, moist niche. Otherwise, I figure if 5 can grow in an ecosystem, then probably 5000 can grow also - and may be on the way.

Jacobson, Wild Plants of Greater Seattle - Second Edition (2008) uses multiple different designations for the different states of wildness that occur.

I'm just making a wild-ass guess, and I will place a side bet that I'm right, lol, that this is an escape from cultivation and/or the progeny of earlier escapes. Of course I don't know for sure-I'm sitting at a desk in Wisconsin!-but I'm more than familiar with what the genus Malus has been up to. Starting to run amuck, simply put.

+oM