Monday, May 25, 2009
THERE’S always something magical about that week in the middle of May when the hawthorn starts to blossom.
It’s a countryside event with great significance for people and for wildlife. The days will get longer and brighter, the weather should improve, the best is still to come.
This is particularly obvious if you live, as I do, in a part of the country where the under-lying rock is limestone. Hawthorn is not that particular about where it grows but it thrives best, and produces the most spectacular show of blossom, in soil with plenty of lime. May blossom is normally chalk white but sometimes you’ll come across a tree or bush with a hint of pink. This pinkness tends to deepen towards the end of the flowering season. These trees are natural variants or ‘sports’. But the deep pink specimens you sometimes see are cultivated varieties derived from the natural sports.
There are two species of hawthorn native to England – the common hawthorn and the midland thorn. Midland thorn (Crataegus laevigata) is also found in Ireland, though it seems to be very rare. It has been recorded in counties Antrim, Cork, Down, Dublin and Kildare.
It’s assumed these specimens originated from ‘quicks’ imported from England. Quicks are what nurserymen call young hawthorn plants.
In the late 18th and early 19th century most of Ireland was "enclosed", or divided up into fields. This was before cheap fencing wire was available and led to such a demand for hawthorn for hedging that domestic supplies couldn’t keep up and millions of quicks were imported.
Midland thorn may not be quite as rare here as the few records suggest because it’s hard to tell apart from common hawthorn. This is further complicated by the fact that the two species can hybridise. If you want to check one out the most reliable way is to wait until autumn and to collect some of the berries or ‘haws’. The haws of common hawthorn have one stone, the midland, two.
Haws, of course, are normally red but you occasionally come across a tree in which they ripen to a yellow colour. They’re certainly not unusual in hedges in Co Wicklow. The experts disagree about these but the likelihood is that they are another cultivated variety developed for ornamental purpose. What doesn’t seem to be clear is whether they were originally developed from common hawthorn or midland thorn.
Hawthorn does make a wonderful hedge that responds well to clipping and provides excellent food and shelter for wildlife. Its big advantage over blackthorn is that it doesn’t throw out aggressive root suckers.
It’s not particularly difficult to grow quicks, but the seed is slow to germinate and the seedlings don’t grow very fast when they do appear.
The word ‘quick’ has nothing to do with speed but has the older meaning of ‘alive’. Going back to prehistoric times, there were two ways of containing livestock and protecting them from wolves at night – you either made a stockade of cut, or dead, thorn branches, or you planted a stockade of live thorns.
To propagate haws put them into a plant pot full of compost and cover with sharp sand. Leave outdoors over winter. A few seeds may germinate in spring. Most of the rest of the seeds should germinate a year later and you can pot on the seedlings or plant in a nursery bed. About five years later you should have a decent hawthorn hedge.
* dick.warner@examiner.ie
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