Margaret's hawthorn

Survives zone 4 through 7

Harvest calendar

Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.

Armed with slender to moderately stout thorns over 3 cm long. A dry-ground hawthorn of hedgerows, thickets and wood margins across the Great Lakes and Midwest.

Hardiness

Zone 4–7

Habit

Shrub

Edible part

Fruit

Ripens

Sept–Oct

Mature size

Shrub to small tree, similar in scale to its close relatives C. macrosperma and C. flabellata (roughly 3–6 m)

Light

Full sun to part shade

Soil pH

5.5–7.5 (mildly acid to mildly alkaline)

Environment

Temperate

Native range

Great Lakes and Midwestern North America — Ontario south through Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia and Wisconsin; dry hedgerows, thickets and wood margins.

Status

Wild

Years to fruit

5–8 yrs from seed; grafted trees often flower heavily in their third year

Growth speed

30–60 cm/year — medium, the 12–24 in/year quoted across the genus.

Spacing

500 cm (197 in) apart — about 25 m² (269 sq ft) per plant

Leaf shape

Widely obovate to almost circular with blunt, rounded lobes, the leaf stalk often as long as the blade itself — an unusually round-leaved hawthorn.

Root system

Seedlings put down a distinct taproot early, which is why nurseries lift them after a single year in the seedbed; established trees add a tough, wide-spreading lateral network and transplant badly once mature.

Fruit description

A small pome ripening September–October, described in the regional floras as yellowish to red — this is a hawthorn known mainly from herbarium material, and the eating quality of its haws is not documented in the way a cultivated species' would be. Treat it as a typical dry, mealy, seedy haw: edible, better cooked into jelly than eaten raw.

Propagation

Seed is slow and stubborn — the stony nutlets need roughly three months warm stratification followed by three months cold at about 4°C, and untreated seed can sit for two winters before moving. Named forms are budded or grafted onto seedling hawthorn rootstock instead, which also brings fruiting forward by several years.

Pollination

Depends on ploidy, which is rarely known for a given plant: diploid hawthorns are self-INCOMPATIBLE and need a second tree, while the many polyploid (triploid/tetraploid) species are self-compatible and largely apomictic, setting seed from a lone tree without cross-pollination. C. crus-galli is among the self-compatible polyploids. Insect-pollinated, chiefly by flies and beetles drawn to the heavy scent. ⚠ Since you usually cannot tell which you have, plant more than one if fruit is the point.

The edible parts listed above are a starting point, not a field guide. Identify a plant with certainty — ideally against a local authority — before eating any part of it, and read the full disclaimer. Spotted something wrong? Report it.