The Thrill of Flowering Crabapples...

Pink crabapple petals drifted around me when I walked through Dianne Mrak’s Dover, NH garden the other day.  I’ve always liked these trees, which bloom in pink, white, or red, but in Diane’s garden I saw them in a new way–flowers deconstructing, petals floating on a breeze and quivering on the ground. My heart sang. Oh—crabapples can be wonderful plants if  you pick a good cultivar like Malus sargentii ‘Tina’, a dwarf cultivar with pink buds and white flowers. (Pick the wrong crab, and it’s a pain–all the woes of the...