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Julian Sutton (species), Nick Dunn (cultivars) (2021)
Recommended citation
Sutton, J. & Dunn, N. (2021), 'Malus montana' from the website Trees and Shrubs Online (treesandshrubsonline.
We include this as little more than a taxonomic note on a problematic name sometimes encountered in the literature. The name M. montana appears in up to date checklists of accepted Malus species (Juniper & Mabberley 2019; Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew 2020) perhaps only by default, the taxon having been largely ignored since being described in 1932, in a Russian paper which we have been unable to access for this account. Juniper & Mabberley (2019) place it among the larger-fruited species of series Malus, and give its distribution as Central Asia. Even Yuzepchuk (1971) in Flora of the USSR, known for its enthusiastic taxonomic splitting, does not mention the name even as a synonym. However, the existence of the name M. orientalis subsp. montana (Uglitzkich) Likhonos (IPNI 2020) rather implies that it may be part of the complex of Caucasian forms in the orbit of M. sylvestris. At any rate, we can find no trace of plants under this name in cultivation in our area, even in the US National Clonal Germplasm Repository (USDA/ARS, National Genetic Resources Program 2020).