‘Hong Shanhu’: A New Flowering Crabapple Cultivar

Crabapple is the traditional term for plants of the genus Malus with fruit measuring less than 5 cm in diameter (Fiala 1994).Crabapples include species such as Malus prunifolia Borkh., Malus spectabilis (Ait.)Borkh., and more, and are distributed mainly in the northern temperate zone (Li 1999).In China, because of the emphasis on germplasm resources, more and more new crabapple varieties with excellent ornamental performance have been selected by horticulturists.However, of all known crabapple cultivars, most ornamental traits are focused on flower color and shape, such as 'Juan Zhulian' (Zeng et al. 2022), 'Fen Balei' (Zhou et al. 2019), 'Hongzi Die' (Luo et al. 2025), and 'Yunjuan Yunshu' (Lu et al. 2023); and attractive foliage color, such as 'Duojiao' (Zhang et al. 2020).Currently, the breeding trend for crabapples continues to be to breed new varieties with unusual flower shapes, double petals, and novel flower colors, but their luscious display of fruit in autumnand especially in winter-is particularly rare.We introduce the new crabapple cultivar Hong Shanhu, which has the excellent ornamental traits of fruit that remain bright red and persist through the winter.Moreover, this variety displays exceptional winterhardiness.The breeding of this variety will enrich the diversity of ornamental crabapple germplasm resources and provide more choices for landscaping in cold regions.