Description: Shrub or small tree with dense, rounded crown of spreading branches, trunk sinuous, much branched. Often severely pruned or 'laid' in hedges..

Height: 2-10 m

Diameter: 10-30 cm

Leaves: 2.5-5 cm long, 1.2-2.5 cm wide. Ovate or reverse ovate, blunt at tip, broadest beyond middle, tapering to base; deeply 3- to 7- lobed, the lobes often slightly toothed, with side veins ending in both notches and lobes; hairless; petioles long, slender. Shiny green above, paler beneath; shedding late in autumn.

Shoots: Brown or grey, slender, hairless or nearly so, with slender spines.

Bark: Dark orange-brown or pink-brown; narrowly cracked into rectangles; bigger boles fluted or flattened between rounded ribs..

Flowers: 10-15 mm wide; with five white (sometimes pinkish) rounded petals, 20 red stamens, and 1 style; calyx with 5 sepals; fragrant; many on slender stalks in broad flat clusters; in spring.

Fruit: 8-10 mm diameter; elliptical or rounded, bright red pome, with one nutlet; maturing in early autumn.

Habitat: Along roads, in hedges and woods, scrub, tickets, rough grassy habitats, heaths and moors; sun-loving, adaptable to almost any climate or soil. Very commonly planted as a stock-proof hedge, but also growing as isolated trees in wood-pasture, parks etc.

Pink and red-flowered cultivars often planted as ornamentals. Very rugged and long-lived. The berries are eaten by birds, but usually only when more succulent berries have all gone in late winter. We often find little piles of cracked seeds outside the entrances to rodent burrows, showing that they form an important food source for ground-living mammals too.

Range: Europe to Afghanistan, abundant throughout Britain to 500m, to 1700m further south.

Information: Audubon (1980), Mitchell (1988), MacDonald (1984)

Source: Many established, others from Weasdale Nurseries, and from the copious volunteer seedling population.

Purchased: 50 small hedging plants, 1993.03.16

Planted: 1993.04.03, by Mary along west border of Euro-strip to fill in major gaps in this hedge. Other seedlings rescued from various places, grown on in pots for a year or so, and then added as needed to fill gaps.

Progress: small plants tend to be shaded by long grass, and when this dies at the end of the season, the hawthorns are often bent to the ground too. The ones which are maintained for a year or two (which is most of them) gain enough height and strength for this no longer to be a problem, and the 1993 plantings are starting to make a worthwhile contribution to the hedge line. All the old hedge hawthorns are doing fine, many need regular pruning, and a few old free-standing ones are up to 10m and 30 cm diameter, fruiting heavily each year (which is why there are so many volunteer seedlings about :-).

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