Louisa

Louisa is one of the best weeping crabapple varieties, and its attractive sweeping shape makes it a good choice as a small feature tree in a lawn or front-garden.

The blossom is light pink, and the small autumn fruits are yellow.

Our 2-year pot-grown trees are likely to produce blossom in the first spring after planting. We sometimes have "top-worked" forms of this variety, grafted on a clean stem to enhance the cascading effect of the weeping branches.

Growing and Training

Louisa is one of the most disease-resistant of crab apples for the UK climate. Cropping is light by crab-apple standards.

If you wish to have more control over the height at which the branches start to weep, we sometimes have 1-year bare-root trees of this variety. These can be trained up to about 2m or more using a heavy-duty bamboo cane, giving a bit more height than we usually aim for with our container-grown trees. Don't cut the main stem back at the time of planting (as you normally would with a 1-year bare-root tree).

After a while you may notice the branches grow long enough to start trailing on the ground. If you don't like this you can prune the branches back by about 30cm on a mild day in the winter.

Louisa characteristics

• Gardening skillBeginner
• Self-fertile?Self-fertile
• Pollinating othersGood
• Pick seasonLate
• PruningLight prune
• Fruit colourOrange

You might also like these varieties

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  Jelly King
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• 
  John Downie
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• 
  Laura
  Malus Laura is a very upright dwarf crab-apple, with bronze leaves, crimson blossom and maroon fruitlets.
• 
  Sun Rival
  Malus Sun Rival is a popular weeping crab-apple, with pale pink blossom and small red berry-like fruitlets.