How does a flowering crabapple hold up in a storm?
Low, dense and wide-crowned, crabapple takes glaze better than most as a whole tree and almost never threatens a roof. The failure mode on old specimens is the wide, near-horizontal scaffold limb splitting off the trunk under heavy ice, and once that tears out it leaves a large ragged wound that decays fast in a tree with no heartwood durability to spare.
What pruning can and can't prevent
Dormant work from late winter into early spring before bud break is the calendar, but fire blight overrides the calendar: infected wood comes out whenever you find it, cut 8 to 12 inches below the visible canker, in dry weather, sterilizing between cuts. The species trap is watersprouts — crabapple answers interior thinning cuts with a vertical broom of shoots, so an aggressive one-time cleanout commits the customer to annual sprout removal.
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