Photo: Laura Clark — CC BY 4.0 · source
Survives zone 6 through 9
Harvest calendar
Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.
The classic Deep South 'mayhaw' — cranberry-red, tart fruit gathered from swamps and riverbanks each May and turned into the mayhaw jellies and syrups that are a genuine regional foodway across Texas, Louisiana and the Gulf Coast states, distinct from the culinary traditions of the Old World and Asian hawthorns.
- Hardiness
- Zone 6–9
- Habit
- Tree
- Edible part
- Fruit
- Ripens
- Summer–autumn
- Mature size
- Small tree 5–8 m, at home in seasonally flooded ground
- Light
- Full sun to partial
- Soil pH
- 6.0–7.0 (near-neutral)
- Environment
- Wetland
- Native range
- Wet lowlands of the southeastern United States — bottomland forests, swamp margins and seasonally flooded depressions across southeastern Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and the Florida Panhandle, extending north along major river corridors into Arkansas and Oklahoma.
- Status
- Both wild and cultivated
- Years to fruit
- 2–4 yrs
- Growth speed
- Medium — seedling trees typically take 5–8 years to bear, while grafted trees often flower heavily by their third year; can reach roughly a 9 m canopy diameter in the open over time.
- Spacing
- 550 cm (217 in) apart — about 30 m² (326 sq ft) per plant
- Leaf shape
- Simple, alternate, petiolate leaves — oblong to elliptic or cuneiform (wedge-shaped) in outline, without the deep pinnate lobing seen in some other hawthorns.
- Root system
- Not well documented in the literature reviewed; adapted to seasonally waterlogged bottomland soils, suggesting tolerance of periodic root-zone flooding uncommon among Crataegus.
- Fruit description
- Cranberry-red pomes to about 2 cm across, juicy and acid with a pleasant tart flavor; contains up to five fairly large seeds that often fuse together, giving the fruit a cherry-like single-stone appearance. Blooms February–March and ripens May–June — the source of the name 'mayhaw.' Used almost exclusively cooked, into jellies, jams, syrups and preserves rather than eaten fresh.
- Propagation
- Seed germination is slow and erratic, as in most hawthorns — commonly cited as roughly three months of warm stratification (about 15°C) followed by three months of cold stratification (about 4°C), with germination still sometimes taking up to 18 months. Scarifying seed or fermenting it in the pulp before stratification can help; harvesting seed while still green (embryo developed, coat not yet hardened) and sowing immediately in a cold frame is another route to spring germination. Grafting onto seedling rootstock is used to bring named mayhaw selections into bearing faster (often by year three, versus 5–8 years from seed) and to fix fruit quality.
- Pollination
- Self-fertile
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.
Growing guide
Fertilizing. Not a heavy feeder. Because it naturally grows in wet, periodically flooded bottomland soils, it tolerates — and largely doesn't need — rich feeding; a light general fertilizer at planting is enough for young trees, and mature specimens in suitably moist ground need little supplemental feeding.
How it spreads. Grows as a thorny shrub or small tree to about 9 m, single- or multi-trunked, forming a rounded crown; not documented as a suckering colonizer, though it can form dense stands in the wet bottomland habitat it favors.
Growing tips. Needs full sun for good fruit set — semi-shade noticeably reduces yield. Tolerates — even prefers — excessively moist or seasonally flooded soil once established, unlike many other hawthorns, reflecting its native swamp-margin habitat; it also tolerates drought once established and is hardy to roughly -30°C. As with other Crataegus, watch for fireblight and for cedar-hawthorn rust where junipers grow nearby.
Companion planting. Rosaceae host for cedar-apple/hawthorn rust (Gymnosporangium spp.), which needs both a Rosaceae host and a Juniperus (juniper/eastern red cedar) host to complete its life cycle. Spores can travel over a mile, so distance alone won't fully prevent it — resistant cultivars are the more reliable control, but avoiding nearby junipers helps.
Grow journal
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