The city planted this, and a friend claims that he ID’d it with his iPhone as half plum, half birch! I told him it wasn’t, but now I would like to know just what it is. Its bloom is only on the one limb that juts off to the left of the picture.
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Not a ornamental crabapple?
Surely that limb was grafted on? Hard to imagine any other reason why one limb would bloom so profusely while the rest of the tree doesn’t. I can also see why the iphone app might think that main trunk was birch with that paper-peeling bark- but I’m not sure it is.
Good observations. My first thought was a crab - and sure enough, there was a dried up 1 1/2" diameter, many-seeded fruit under the tree. So now I know it’s not a stone fruit., so ornamental crabapple is probably right.
Accepting that part as settled, there’s the question of what the rest of the tree is. It isn’t very clear in the pictures, but the leaves on both parts of the tree are virtually identical, allowing for ordinary variations. And it isn’t clear to me whether the limb to the left is grafted on, or there is something else going on.
But if we don’t accept the idea that the tree is a crabapple, nor a stone fruit, it raises the next question - what is it then? Are there any birches with multi-seeded fruit? Well a quick Wikipedia settled that! Nope, that’s not how they do it. We can rule that one out.
I’m pretty well OK with flowering crab, but I do need a better idea of why one side would be so much different from the others. Maybe it is a grafted tree. Maybe there were supposed to be multiple varieties on the original and this is the only one that lasted.
Once you figure it out let me know, ay?
:-)M
I think the flowering branch was grafted, or the rest of the tree was grafted and took over
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Sure looks like a crab.
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Ornamental crabapple originally grafted to dolgo rootstock, and an unpruned sucker took over?
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I like it.