July 20 is National Lollipop Day, which just goes to show, there’s a day for just about anything. 

Other than helping a bit with a throat tickle, I don’t think of lollipops as being very useful. They certainly have never satisfied my 2 pm chocolate craving.

But here’s a little Lollipop that actually is useful: it’s a truly dwarf crabapple tree. It was selected by the breeder, Jim Zampini, because it maintains its neat habit and dwarf (8′) form. 

Lollipop® Malus is one of fourteen Proven Winners® ColorChoice® trees – with more to come.

Lollipop® crabapple has loads of white flowers that will produce shiny red fruits in fall. Birds and wildlife love them.

This is a useful plant for formal mass plantings or as a well-behaved specimen. Homeowners often want assurances that a plant won’t get “too big”. Here’s one that won’t.

It will do best in full sun and is hardy to USDA Zone 4 (AHS heat tolerance of 8).

Here we go a-Flinging!

Speaking of Crabapples, when I was at the long-awaited and oft-rescheduled Garden Bloggers Fling in Madison a couple of weeks ago, I learned a little something about them. The difference between a crabapple and an apple is simple, its size! The tour guide at UW Madison Arboretum taught us that a crabapple is less than 2″ in diameter. Anything bigger is an apple!

In four days, we visited 19 public and private gardens – 20 for Kathy Jentz and me, as we visited Mark Dwyer at the Edgerton Hospital Healing Garden on Monday. There were many bloggers who took much nicer photos than mine, but nonetheless, here is my online photo journal of this year’s Fling. You can also look at them by location (in albums) here. Feel free to let me know if I mislabeled anything, I’m still trying to get the hang of this. Don’t hesitate to ask if you’d like to use any of my photos for your blogs!