Backyard apple breeding

Apple: Huonville Crab

Shane Gadsby -

A beautiful edible crab apple with striking red flowers, bronze-red leaves, and red-fleshed apples!

  • Vigour: Medium (Reasonable amount of woody growth, required good training)
  • Precociousness: Medium (often fruits in 1 year after grafting)
  • Resistances: Shows resistance to woolly aphids, and powdery mildew
  • Size of fruit: Crab
  • Flowering: Early
  • Fruiting: Early
  • Cropping: Medium to heavy
  • Ploidy: Diploid (?)
  • Flesh colour: Red
  • Leaf colour: Red-bronze (maturing to grey-green in late season)
  • Parentage: Unknown (member of Malus x Purpurea?)
  • Descendants: Magnus Summer Surprise
  • Biennialism: None observed
  • Growth habit: Standard V
  • Self-fertile: No

The Huonville Crab, first discovered in Huonville, Tasmania (Australia) by Robert Magnus in 1989 as a chance seedling tree, that

"...[was] About 10m high, it had distinctive purplish green leaves, and was loaded with of golfball-size bright red apples that had a deep red flesh when bitten into." - Robert Magnus, Woodbridge Fruit Trees

Noted for it's bright red skin that remains unblemished, scarlet red flesh, and dessert-like qualities (as compared with standard crab apples that is), it is quite sweet and acidic, with the acidity waning in storage.

However despite it's striking appearance, it lacks the complexity found in some most true dessert apples, and has been noted as being hit or miss in regards to the tendency for red-fleshed apples to have berry flavours.

It flowers early with large bright red flowers, and high levels of pollen, and as such has been noted to be a very good pollinator, especially for other early varieties, but with manual pollination seems very compatible with almost all varieties.

Leaves start as a red-bronze, slowing becoming a grey-green as they mature later in the season, and wood is a dark red-brown. Inner wood is distinctly red, as can be seen when collecting scion-wood (or grafting it).

As is similar in may crab varieties, it will tend towards heavier cropping, and little to no described biennialism.
Fruits are smallish (between 20-50mm) and so high crop loads appear to do little to no damage on established trees.

It's also noteworthy that while the exact parentage is unknown, there are many species of wild red-fleshed crab apple that are unique to Tasmania (and the Huonville region in particular), including many in the Malus x Purpurea family (such as the patented Wychwood Ruby), having many similar traits, but being more crab-like, and so may share some lineage with the Huonville Crab!

The Huonville Crab is also noted for being the parent of the much improved variety, the Magnus Summer Surprise.