Photo: Yongxinge — CC BY-SA 3.0 · source
Survives zone 4 through 8
Harvest calendar
Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.
Grown specifically for its tart, vitamin C- and pectin-rich fruit, which underpins real, still-thriving Chinese food traditions — tanghulu candy, shanzhagao fruit leather, haw flakes, jams and preserves — as well as traditional medicinal use as a digestive aid, distinguishing it sharply from the other hawthorns on this list.
- Hardiness
- Zone 4–8
- Habit
- Tree
- Edible part
- Fruit
- Ripens
- Summer–autumn
- Mature size
- Small tree 4–6 m; the cultivated var. major is the larger, better-fruited form
- Light
- Full sun
- Soil pH
- 6.0–7.0 (near-neutral)
- Environment
- Temperate
- Native range
- Northeastern Asia — China, Korea, Mongolia and the Russian Far East (Amur region) — growing on riverbanks, sandy soils, stony slopes and among shrubs at elevations from about 100 to 2,000 m.
- Status
- Cultivated
- Years to fruit
- 2–4 yrs
- Growth speed
- Medium — reaches roughly 7 m by 7 m at maturity; seedling trees take 5–8 years to bear, grafted trees often by year three.
- Spacing
- 600 cm (236 in) apart — about 36 m² (388 sq ft) per plant
- Leaf shape
- Broadly ovate to diamond-shaped, 5–9 cm, pinnately lobed (the source of the species name) with irregular, deeply cut, serrated lobes giving a feathery outline; leathery texture, bright green.
- Root system
- A taproot, growing directly downward much like a carrot's, rather than the shallower branching heart-root pattern seen in some other hawthorns.
- Fruit description
- Bright red, apple-scented pome around 1.5–2.5 cm across (some cultivated forms to about 3.8 cm), with a mealy flesh texture, distinctly tart-acid and slightly bitter flavor, and high in vitamin C and pectin. Eaten raw but far more often processed — this is the shanzha of tanghulu (sugar-coated skewered fruit), shanzhagao (haw flake/fruit leather), jams, jellies, wine and traditional dried medicinal preparations.
- Propagation
- Best sown fresh in autumn; stored seed needs about three months of warm stratification (around 15°C) followed by three months of cold stratification (around 4°C), and germination is still often slow and spread over more than a year because of the hard seed coat and dormant embryo. Fermenting seed in its own pulp, or harvesting and sowing it green before the coat hardens, can speed things up. Grafting is used for named cultivars grown for the candied-fruit trade — grafted trees can flower heavily by year three versus 5–8 years from seed.
- 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. Adaptable to a wide pH range (roughly 5.5–7.5) and to sandy, loamy or clay soils, so it isn't demanding, but for fruit quality a balanced feed during the growing season with extra potassium ahead of and during fruiting improves yield and flavor; avoid excess nitrogen, which pushes leafy growth at the expense of fruit set.
How it spreads. Forms a small to medium deciduous tree with a dense, rounded crown, typically single-trunked; most cultivated forms are thornless or only lightly thorned, in contrast to the strongly thorny habit typical of the genus. Not a suckering or colonizing species.
Growing tips. This is the hawthorn behind two major genuine Chinese culinary and medicinal traditions: the fresh fruit (shanzha) is skewered and dipped in hot sugar syrup to make tanghulu, the classic candied-fruit street snack, and cooked into shanzhagao (haw flake/fruit leather); it's also dried and used in traditional Chinese medicine as a digestive aid and is researched for cholesterol-lowering and circulatory effects. Full sun gives the best fruit yield and quality, though it tolerates semi-shade, pollution and exposed sites. As with other Crataegus, watch for fireblight and cedar-hawthorn/Gymnosporangium rust where junipers are 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
Sign in to keep a dated log of when you planted, bloomed and harvested this plant.