Using Hawthorn Fruit/In Praise of Hawthorn

I love collecting and trialing new trees. A lot of thee times I wind up trying to grow trees whose fruit I've never eaten--certain cultivars of apples, plums, etc, and whole entire types such as butternut, jujube, etc.

One tree that I love growing is hawthorn in its various forms. I have Mayhaws, Chinese Hawthorn, Tejocote (Mexican Hawthorn), and soon I'll be getting a culinary cultivar of Eastern North American Hawthorn.

My trees are starting to fruit this year, and though I'm excited, I realize that I've never eaten or used hawthorn.

So, what's it like? How do you use it? And what do you love about hawthorn trees in general?

I love their blooms, and how primordial the fruit strike me as being. They just seem to resonate with me in a certain way.

I find haws a very boring fruit, it's dry and pretty tasteless I add the fruit to my hedgerow jelly, which will be a mix of blackberry, elderberry, rosehips, hawthorn and anything else I come across in to small quantities to use on their own like plums, apples, rowen, cherry etc etc. However the leaves right now when they have first come out are a nice addition to salad and the flowers are also edible and medicinal working well in tea to reduce blood pressure. Of course the wood is very hard and a good wood for both burning and carving.

Is it a wild type hawthorn or an improved variety?


I like that they bloom late. Fruit trees like quince and medlar are also staples if mine because of how reliable they are

mayhaws (C. opaca or aestivalis) are a delicacy when made into jelly. some varieties such as superspur are fairly cold hardy, but they are generally a southern US tree

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayhaw