Should I remove or save my flowering crabapple?
Flowering Crabapple isn't a habitual problem species, so a sound one is usually worth an opinion before it comes out. Crabapple is the most-planted small tree in central Indiana subdivisions and it generates more "is my tree dying?" calls than anything else its size — because scab-susceptible cultivars go yellow and defoliate in July and August every single year while remaining perfectly alive. Most of these calls end in a spray program or a replacement conversation, not a removal.
How to tell which one you've got
The signature midsummer yellow-and-drop that panics owners is apple scab defoliation, and the tree refoliates the following spring — it is a cultivar problem, not a death sentence. Real decline reads on a different schedule: thin, sparse foliage in spring rather than late summer, a shrinking flower load year over year, dead scaffold limbs, and trunk cankers or borer holes on a tree past 40 years.
The structural question
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.
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