Identification: Apple - singles, white with pink, green leaves, very late cherry season

I don't know about apples in Vancouver, but Salt Spring Island apples are out now (end of April) with the Avium sweet cherries, and since hardly any of my friends could tell me which was which, I'm posting this for comparison. The sweet cherries have quite small pure white blossoms lining the stems, so many of the trees seem to have fat white arms sticking out all over. The apple blossoms are more randomly arranged on the tree, and they're larger than cherry blossoms, tinged with pink, with open little circles forming a star in the centre. If the trunks are not totally covered with lichen, you can see that the cherry bark is horizontally striped and the apple bark is not. Denis Laplante took the photos for me.

 

Looks like an orchard apple. If, in fact a named cultivar may be able to find out by taking at least 6 fruits to an expert for possible identification (there are a galaxy of kinds of apple trees but some are locally common and distinctive). Last year a local fruit show was mentioned on this site, if like the ones they have down here there will be an identification table set up, with volunteers attempting to tell people what they have or have found.

 

Please, nobody identify this apple on this forum. The posting was just to show some general apple characteristics that are not cherry characteristics.

 

You needn't worry about apple identifications from images of these flowers. Unlike Sato-zakura, orchard apples are pretty much alike in flower. Selection and breeding in apples has been generally all about fruit. Not so in crabapples, of course, many of which have been selected and bred for both flowers and fruit. However, if you are interested in apple cultivars, the BC Fruit Testers Association mounts an incredible display of apple cultivars and helps out with identifications at the (fabulous) UBC Botanical Garden Apple Festival, which is on October 13 and 14 this year (2007).

 

The 2008 UBC Botanical Garden Apple Festival is October 18-19 (posted so that last year's date in a previous posting doesn't mislead anyone).