Election Section

The little Crataegus trees—hawthorns, thorntrees—in that grassy strip of Sacramento Street between Dwight Way and University Avenue bloom in the spring with pretty white flowers, but this is the season when they come into their own. They dress themselves in red berries while they still have leaves, then drop the leaves and keep the berries. On their slender horizontal branches, the berries hang gracefully and usefully all winter. 

They look seasonally jolly through Yule and feed our winter birds, too. I’ve seen flocks of cedar waxwings passing berries to one another, and robins in rowdy groups large enough to make the branches droop. The resident youth gangs of crows seem to spend a lot of time on the grass in those strips, and I suspect that fallen berr ies might be part of the attraction. (Crows and ravens typically spend a year or two after fledging in a roving group of their age-mates before claiming territories and pairing off to breed.) 

There are zillions, to use a technical term, of Crataegus spec ies and they hybridize madly. So I’m not going to venture a guess about whether these are European or North American thorns until I’ve talked to whoever procured them, and I’d be cautious then. 

They’re small trees or multi-stemmed shrubs, when left to th eir own devices; the shrubby kind is often pruned up into tree shape for gardens. They’re good for a small space, as they have small leaves, fruit, and flowers—all in scale—and their pale bark and interesting twig patterns reward a close look. The “haw” i n the often-used name “hawthorn” is an old words for “hedge,” and some species and individuals, though by no means all, do indeed have thorns. 

Bering members of the rose family, they’re subject to its troubles: fireblight, assorted fungi and diseases, th e usual bugs. But they’re not nearly so touchy as the average garden rose, and I haven’t seen a lot of sick hawthorns. (Knock wood.) 

One thing all the species have in common is that they’re good winter wildlife chow; another is that they’re also fodder f or myths and legends. Vance Randolph, the legendary Ozark folklore chronicler, wrote: 

Both redhaw [Crateagus] and blackhaw bushes are common in the Ozarks, and both are connected in the hillman’s mind with sexual misadventures-rapes and unfortunate pregn ancies and disastrous abortions and the like. 

This association probably traveled to our continent with the whole unruly bundle of European thorn tree legends. Consider the ballad “Down by the Greenwood Side:” “She leaned her back up against a thorn/… And there she had two little babes born.” The birth in question was not a welcome one, and the subject of the song ends up condemned to “seven years in the flames of Hell” for drowning them like kittens. 

Older European traditions about hawthorn include some contradictory stories; Greeks considered it the flower of married and general conjugal love, sacred to Hymenaeus, who among other activities played his lute for newlyweds. (In fact, if you read the various tales of Hymenaeus and his fellow Erotes, you’ll wonder where he found the time for musicianship. Not your average wedding singer, this guy.) 

Farther north, the Nordic folks regarded hawthorn as fit wood for a funeral pyre, as its smoke bore souls into the afterlife. I wonder if their habit of holding berries in winter qualified them for that. Today, on All Saints’ Day, one of the Dias de los Muertos, they’re doubly in season. 

As part of the Celtic sacred trio of Oak, Ask, and Thorn—which I notice some perhaps crypto-Pagan city garden planner has contrived to plant together along that stretch of Sacramento—hawthorns are variously the abode and disguise of witches, sacred to the Sidhe, a charm against evil spirits and fouling of meat or milk in storage and for better milk production in the dairy barn, and carried for good luck in fishing. 

Christians adapted all this luckiness by a declaring that Joseph of Arimathea carried a hawthorne staff and planted it in Britain, where it grew into a grand tree, the ancestor of all English thorns. Cromwell’s sold iers supposedly cut it down, but its seedlings have been passed from hand to hand and grown all over the island and beyond. 

Photograph by Ron Sullivan 

Crataegus trees—hawthorns, thorntrees—bloom with white flowers in the spring, but this is the season wh en they dress themselves in red berries.¥