Apple blossom, the state flower of Arkansas

How to recognize it

Apple blossoms come in clusters on bare or newly leafing branches in spring. Each flower has five rounded petals, white or flushed with pink, often pinker in bud, around a cluster of yellow-tipped stamens. Many are sweetly fragrant.

The Encyclopedia of Arkansas gives the scientific name Malus coronaria, the sweet crabapple, a native North American tree. It is a small, spreading tree about 20 to 30 feet tall with toothed, slightly lobed leaves. Its flowers are white to rose-pink, about one and a half to two inches across and strongly fragrant, and they open from April into early summer, followed by hard, sour green-yellow crabapples. In practice the 1901 resolution was about Arkansas’s orchard apples, so the emblem stands for apple blossoms in general.

Arkansas also has its own native crabapple, the southern crabapple, Malus angustifolia, whose fragrant pink-to-white flowers appear in April and May in woodland edges and old fields.

Where to see it

Apple and crabapple trees bloom in mid-spring across Arkansas, usually around April. Ornamental crabapples are planted widely, especially in northwest Arkansas, the old heart of the state’s apple country. The town of Lincoln in Washington County holds an annual Apple Festival.

Chosen with a bushel of apples

In 1900 the Arkansas Floral Emblem Society polled women’s groups around the state to pick a state flower. Holly, honeysuckle, the passionflower, the cotton boll and the apple blossom were all in contention. Love Barton of the society’s Searcy chapter championed the apple blossom, pointing to the state’s prize-winning apples. According to the story, on January 30, 1901, she brought a bushel of polished apples to the Senate chamber.

The General Assembly adopted the apple blossom by resolution, and Governor Jeff Davis signed it on February 1, 1901. Arkansas was the second state, after Michigan in 1897, to choose it.

An emblem that outlived its crop

Around 1900 Arkansas grew hundreds of apple varieties, with orchards concentrated in the northwest. That industry has since faded. By 2002 Arkansas grew only about 3.4 million pounds of apples on about 900 acres. The blossom remains as a reminder of the orchards of a century ago.