Does anyone here have experience with “blue hawthorn” (Crataegus schraderiana). It is apparently being lumped with C. orientalis by some botanists, but that species contains diversity beyond the type being referred to here. It is apparently a sweet tasting species which is suitable for fresh eating, and although I can’t find a lot of info on it, I did find some interesting tid-bits that peaked my interest.
Note: The fruit isn’t blue, but rather reddish-purple. “Blue” seems to be in reference to its blue-green foliage.
In this video, the presenter is showing various Crataegus species growing in a garden. While his focus doesn’t seem to be edibility, he did taste the C. schraderiana on camera (apparently for the first time) and he seemed pleasantly surprised stating “It’s actually quite sweet, and really quite nice.”
Plants for a Future ranks it at a 5 out of 5 for edibility which is saying something considering that some other commonly eaten species get ranked lower for edibility. (They do spell the name wrong though)
It appears to be available from multiple nurseries in Europe, though at present it looks like only one nursery has it in the US. It’s currently available at Planting Justice in California, but was previously available at Forest Farm in Oregon.
I found a video someone make comparing Crataegus schraderiana with C. arnoldiana and C. ellwangeriana, but it seems to be in Russian and I can’t understand any of it.
I don’t have any experience with them personally. I agree, 5/5 on PFAF is a encouraging. Ive tasted a lot of haws, and they run the gamut. Crataegus taxonomy is a hot mess, as you surely know. Monogyna is simple enough to tell apart, but I see more of a spectrum of traits in the endemic ones here that would seem to defy easy classification.
I have mostly grafted the carriere hawthorn, which is a pretty common street tree. It tastes good, has bigger fruit and fewer thorns than the Washington hawthorn or the Douglas native that the birds give us.
Ive eaten a bunch of different arnoldia- there’s a whole block of them at (forgetting now if it was Arnold Arboretum or Brooklyn Botanical Garden) and they were dead ripe during one of my visits. It wasn’t exactly yesterday, but my recollection (as might be expected) is that they (the various cultivars of arnoldia that is) varied from mealy to firm, bland to sweet, flat to pleasantly acid. If course that’s what we observe in other species too- a range of traits in a random distribution.
Id be surprised if there were a “species” of Crataegus that represented a uniquely reliable combination of traits, though it might well tend toward that or represent a better genetic potential. I think its better to focus on exceptional individuals, especially given that their so cosmopolitan in their ability to cross. It seems like there’s a lot of untapped breeding potential there, for sure.
So far, I have found exactly one individual that is worthy of propagation. I should really hike up and try to nab some scions before the buds push much more than they already have.
Crataegus “arnoldiana” is actually a large fruited form of Crataegus submollis found growing naturally in Arnold Arboretum, hence the name.
For further reading I do recommend a book by Ron Lance - A Guide to Hawthorns of the Southeastern US (2014)
all I know for sure is the fruit is pretty large, tasty, and produced in abundance. I nibbled a few, as I usually do when encountering haws and quickly turned to noshing on them pretty intently. My kids tried them and quickly started eating them by the handful, as did some other random passers by. thats my daughter under the tree (little red riding hood) scooping them up!
the little bit of research Ive done indicates that species id often hinges upon close analysis (under magnification) of flower parts or in other cases the tissue around the seeds. There’s an arcane term for that tissue, which I don’t currently recall. other obvious traits, like leaf shape or shape and quantity of thorns are not terribly pertinent. Ive tried to figure out some basic id and have pretty much throw my hands up at the amount of contradictory info and overall paucity of info would suggest its pretty fraught. Id be happy to learn otherwise though!
I suspect that in time a lot of the difficult to distinguish species will get lumped together with various current species getting demoted to varieties. Apparently many reproduce apomictically so slight variations get perpetuated without further genetic mixing with their derivative populations. In my view, if they are just self cloning then they really aren’t diverging much from the original species even if they’re no longer mixing with it…
not sure how much stock to put in any of this, but the gobotany info would casually suggest a non-match to C. submollis. Specifically, it doesnt show up as occurring in my county, the description says it has a “stout trunk” and that the fruit is “inedible to humans”. again, Id probably take that mostly with a grain of salt. My experience is that most people take so little notice of obscure shrubs, and scientifically minded folks who do document such things are apt to reproduce the errant info that they refer to. Similar things are afoot with Amelanchier and Quercus. You see individuals that DO seem to represent a particular species or more accurately “type”, but then you see almost endless gradations between those. It seems to tug at the very concept of species, revealing some gap or inadequacy in our otherwise useful framework
that’s it. Species are a distinction for utility and that’s all, people might not like to hear this but species isn’t always a useful designation, especially for crazy genera like in the rose family. But humans need names for things so these people aren’t going to be out of a job anytime soon
I bought some red chinese haw from @Marta this past winter. Looking forward to trying them!
It sounds like there are some quite good quality selections out there, though its hard to find them.
Hawthorn seeds are really tough to germinate. i think scarification is necessary, and they probably need double stratification or some combination of warm/cold in sequence. The funny thing, given that fickleness, is that they come up like CRAZY as oldfield pioneer species. I have droves of them here in my orchard and Ive yet to plant one. Perhaps its the act of getting eaten and distributed by critters- and passing through a GI tract- that makes the difference
There’s a contorted hawthorn with pink flowers that was given to me a few years back. I ran out of steam and didn’t graft it (ugh) but it sounded really cool. I was told it was very striking in appearance, like Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick
It’s funny, but many domestic apples are now complex hybrids and still get lumped together as Malus domestica despite actually not being derived from only one species (sometimes actually multiple species). With cultivated forms of hawthorn we could probably benefit more from just applying cultivar names with documented data for each and not worry about actual species id since most of us are likely to assign the wrong species designation to them anyways. I am growing some seedlings from a tree that’s being sold as a cultivar of azarole, but the leaf form is 100% not a match for that species. I think I’ve identified it as C. submollis, but noticed in my pictures the leaves on my trees have narrow wings on their petioles which I don’t see represented in pictures online…
I like when people append botanical names with additional scientific terms to show what level of certainty they have when applying them. For example:
*Crataegus submollis = This is the species
*Crataegus cf. submollis = Approximate placement is this species
*Crataegus aff. submollis = Doesn’t fit a named species, but has close affinity to this species
*Crataegus sp. = Species has not yet been determined
Native PNW Douglas hawthorn has small purple slightly sweet berries. Chinese hawthorn is late and has a distinctive shape. Green hawthorn has bad tasting berries. Washington is invasive here: tiny bland berries. Carriere hawthorn has large, good tasting berries and curved thorns. I grow it to eat. They are all distinctive.
