Question
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You did so well in helping us identify our dogwood bushes with tiny blue berries. Now we need help identifying a tree with fruit. The fruit look like small apples (crabapples?). Please see attached. Thank you!
AnswerThese look more like untended apple than crabapple to me, though it's hard to be sure from the picture. Apple would have somewhat rounded teeth, and the fruits would be over an inch across. Crabapple would probably have some short, inch-long pointy branchlets or thorns on the branches, with nothing growing from them.
Apples and crabapples are both edible. Hawthorn and pears also have similar fruit and are also edible. I don't' know of any poisonous plant that looks like this, but I still am not comfortable recommending you eat them, without the actual specimen in hand.
Any of these fruits would look like an apple or pear inside. That is, if you were to cut them in half through the fat part #not end to end# you would see a star-shaped structure with the thicker walls #core# surrounding the seed chambers.
Hawthorns have smooth, long thorns on the branches, very distinctive. Pears usually have more elongated fruit. Apple and pear both have rounded teeth on the leaves, but apples are generally hairier beneath.
