Nature's Mystery

Do you see all those little red crabapples on this tree? There are tons of them, all becoming visible now in early fall.

This Sugar Tyme crapabble is still a ridiculously ungainly small tree, nowhere near the shady presence in my back yard that I am planning for. It will take years for that to happen.

But even as a young tree it flowers and fruits. However, this year it did not flower much at all. In spring I saw a few white blossoms tucked in among the foliage, but they were very sparse, maybe a dozen or so. I never got a picture of the tree in bloom, there was simply nothing to see.

So where did the all the fruit come from? It's laden with red crabapples all over. There had to be flowers and they had to be pollinated, right? Fruit doesn't just appear from nowhere.

It's nature's mystery.

Like the year my neighbor's apricot tree flowered too early in spring and a hard freeze blasted every single emerging flower into brown mush. There was nothing to pollinate, no flowers had opened and none survived. The tree was fine, but it had limp brown kleenex tissues hanging off it that spring.

That summer she had a bumper crop of golden apricots. The tree has never fruited like that again. There were so many apricots and each of them a perfect jewel globe. She shared a lot and there were still too many.

What on earth had produced so much fruit when every bloom had been zapped?

No flowers, no fruit, that's how it works unless it doesn't. I do not understand nature's mysterious ways.