Plant Profile: Manchurian Apricot

Since we’re heading into winter here, with snow on the ground, I thought I’d try to do one plant profile every 2 weeks to give a little information about what is in the forest garden so far. Hopefully this will get me to spring when I start bringing in new plants and can continue with these profiles biweekly. We will see. Without further delay…

Time for our first plant profile!

Manchurian Apricot (Prunus armeniaca var. mandshurica)

I know what you’re thinking… an Apricot?! Mais oui. This apricot tree is native to Korea and Manchuria (Manchuria: an exonym for several large overlapping historical and geographic regions in Northeast Asia) and is hardy to Zone 3. It is a relative to our native plums. So some clever person brought it over to North America.

Manchuria

The tree grows up to 12 feet tall, but there are instances of some growing to 26 feet tall with a 32 foot spread just over in North Dakota, so you never know. The bark is smooth and brown, and kind of shiny if you ask me. This tree can live to be 30 years old, which should be long enough to get me into a ripe old age where I no longer want to pick apricots anyways.

The fruit are fairly small, at an average of 1.5 inches in diameter and are your typically apricot colour. The fruit are supposed to be “abundant” in late summer, and I’m hoping to see this once my tree grows larger than a few twigs. The fruit are good eaten fresh, or used to make jams and jellies.

It has beautiful pink flowers in spring that are extremely fragrant. However, it blooms early which can make it susceptible to frost, so we may have some missed crop years depending how the frost goes. 

In fall, the leaves turn beautiful golds and reds, which we already experienced this fall. Once the tree is larger, it should be a beautiful feature tree in the fall season.  

So that's the Manchurian Apricot! Another profile will be on the way in 2 weeks.