Hi Everyone. I received an order of scion yesterday, and in it was hawthorn. I don’t know what I was thinking when I ordered it. I don’t know what I’m going to graft it to. I guessing that I read something on the forum that prompted me to order it. Does it graft to callery?
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@clarkinks will probably know for sure, but I think you can graft pear to hawthorn, so maybe the other way around would work.
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@mayhaw9999 may be able to shed some light on this, as well.
I have grafted pears onto hawthorn understocks… suspect that you could do the reciprocal, if only to provide it a ‘foster home’ until you can source some seedling hawthorn rootstock.
My remaining pear-on-hawthorn tree, grafted in 2001, is pretty significantly dwarfed… it’s only about 8 ft tall, 22 years later… and the pear trunk is almost twice the diameter of the cockspur hawthorn stem supporting it.
It may be that on a callery rootstock, you’ll get phenomenal growth of the hawthorn… or you may get prodigious suckering of the pear below the graft… IDK.
Out of curiosity… what hawthorn did you get?
I have a number of mayhaws (Crataegus species), but all are grafted onto cockspur hawthorn (C.crus-galli) understocks.
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Unfortunately, i have no experience on this. Everyone i know has only done the opposite. Here is my limited experience. Most everything i graft on pear is not the same as pear grafted on them. Quince on pear will not stay alive more than 2 or 3 years, but pear on quince lives fine. Pear on aronia stays alive. Pear on hawthorne lives. In this way, pear adapts better to other trees or bushes than the other way around.
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Crataegus x lavallei aka Lavalle Hawthorn
Now, seeing that it’s a crataegus, I was probably looking at it, but probably didn’t mean to order it. I planted various crataegus last year but nothing large enough to graft to.
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Like probably many others, I get hawthorn rootstock for free. The birds plant it for me.
This is a really good type of hawthorn. I have grafted it to some trees in my yard. This is one of the better tasting hawthorn fruits. Some are tiny and bland. This one is not. It has a mild apple flavor and fewer thorns than other hawthorns. It is a very common street tree around here. That’s where I got my scions.
Remember, hawthorn is a celebrated heart medicine, for thousands of years, known worldwide depending on the species. Mexican is called tejocote and is often made into a type of punch. China has one that is celebrated and made into candy. In Ireland, the people say that you should never cut down a hawthorn tree because it is a “portal to the other side”. The leaves are a vegetable. I have been eating them for years.
I still have good fruit on my tree and it’s the end of February. It tastes good too.
John S
PDX OR
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I will be trying some hawthorn and medlars on plum this year. Wish me luck]
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The lavalle hawthorn that is good is often referred to as the Carriere hawthorn. I think it’s something like crataegus lavallei v. carriere or something like that. Heart disease is the leading killer of Americans. If I can eat tasty fruit to stop it, that’s the kind of medicine I like!
John S
PDX OR
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Hi Lucky,
I’ve not experimented with pear on hawthorn or vice versa. I know that it, quince, and Amelanchier can be used as dwarfing rootstocks for pear. And, my hawthorn experience is limited to mayhaw which I believe may belong to several species. I was introduced to mayhaw by TO Warren and Sherwood Akin. TO and I think Sherwood both liked Parsley haw as a rootstock and that is what I used in northern Mississippi. The mayhaws that I’m growing in northern CA 50+ miles north of San Francisco are grafted onto mayhaw seedlings. This is a Mediterranean climate with no rain for at least 6 months. Certainly a long way from the humid southeast and the sometimes almost swampy area that mayhaws thrive in. I get enough fruit to make a few small jars of jelly to satisfy my southern longing!
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David, @mayhaw9999
Travis Callahan introduced me to mayhaws, and provided me with my first scions… which are still growing on C.crus-galli seedlings I dug out of the cowpasture 20 years ago. I’ve long since lost IDs on all of mine except Dr. Richard O’Barr’s ‘Collossal’ selection, which he sent to me some years later.
I never met TO Warren or Sherwood Akin, but Sherwood’s daughter Jeri and I used to trade emails and some plant materials.
Mine are not quite so far away from the swamps of LA,MS, AL as yours, but still quite a ways from their native habitat. Biggest issue for me is cedar-hawthorn rust. I don’t spray, so some years it takes the entire crop… but occasionally, I’ll get enough mayhaw fruits to make a small batch of jelly.
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Lucky,
I had cedar-hawthorn-rust also. None here in CA. In those MS days I sprayed a lot. I can’t remember what I used but it was quite effective. My wife grows garlic here that is plagued by rust. She uses Serenade which seems to help. Non-toxic Bacillus subtilis. Approved for organic gardening, I think.
I have two varieties of Mayhaw - Harrington’s Late Pink and a red one that I think is TO Warren’s Big Red. I got the last from another transplanted Mississippian who lived in southern CA - his scions from TO.
I have - though IDs are long lost - Big Red, Royalty, Texas Star, Duck Lake, and O’Barr’s Collossal. And a seedling of Rchard Fahey’s ‘Cherry Hawthorn’.
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Did these grafts work? I’ve read that some Hawthorns are graft compatible with a wide variety of trees. I’m growing a few different varieties of Hawthorn seedlings for intergeneric graft attempts.
I’m also interested in this. While I don’t think intergeneric multigrafts are likely best in most situations, they could be a really interesting novelty for those of us who like plants partly just for the fun of it. They also could have value for those who are extremely pressed for space. Keep us updated how your experiment goes! Where did you obtain your seeds/seedlings?
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I harvested some tejocote seeds from fruit I bought at the grocery store, and I also purchased seed from two blue-fruited varieties on Etsy and eBay. All of them had incredibly hard seed coats. Scarification and acid treatments produced poor results, so I ultimately resorted to using vise grips and a hammer to extract the seeds—though I broke quite a few in the process.
I also purchased a couple of rootstocks from Fruitwood Nursery. After reading two papers suggesting that some hawthorn species may be compatible with Prunus, I thought it would be interesting to test graft compatibility
never got any cuttings.
but in retrospect maybe I meant pear at the time. Plum makes no since.
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It shouldn’t work but apparently they’re doing it in Kurdistan.
That’s certainly interesting. I must have been aware in passing when I made that comment.
That’s really interesting! Makes me want to try some this spring just to see what happens.
I would love to find a site to discuss Hawthorn in more depth. Any ideas appreciated.
In the northern USA, I began to realize that purchasing a Hawthorn is a classic chicken/egg problem. As a tree planting / habitat improvement contractor, I couldn’t purchase local/northern Hawthorns because nobody grows them. The growers told me they wouldn’t grow them because nobody buys them.
This impasse actually has some simple reasons behind it. The most commonly available Hawthorn species is “Washington Hawthorn,” C. phaenopyrum. The problem becomes it’s original natural range - the Ohio River valley. Move one into the northern Great Lakes, where I live, and routine winter die-back results in cumulative growth rates of just an inch or two per year. So yer average Conservation District would buy some wholesale, sell them to landowners retail, then receive plenty of complaints about this, never understanding that the species had been moved too far north. (And quite often not even understanding that there are scores of Hawthorn species, not just one.) The result was a quite poor reputation for the idea of planting Hawthorn.
Meanwhile, Washington Hawthorn is commonly grown because it is easy to grow. I eventually realized the northern species aren’t grown because they are more difficult. Within the Crataegus genera, the average seedcoat thickness of each species increases as one moves north. So Canadian Hawthorns will have thicker seeds than May Haw, from the U.S. south. Thicker seeds are harder to germinate quickly, and uniformly, compared to the southern Crataegus species.
At this point in wildlife habitat work, a funny thing is happening to all the miniature Apple orchards planted by Deer hunters, not for human consumption, but rather for Deer (don’t get me started on that topic). Along the way however, the Deer nuts are routinely forced to abandon their expensive Apple plantings by another four legged creature that just loves Apples - the Black Bear. Bears simply break the branches to get at the Apples until there is no more little Apple tree left, just whatever might be sprouting off the original rootstock.
Gee, if only there were a nice source of soft mast for all the wildlife in the woods, that evolved right along with Bears, and could somehow defend itself against them - check the 2nd syllable in the word Hawthorn.
But this simplistic knowledge is now largely lost to all but a few Wildlife Biologists - who can’t purchase Hawthorn, either, or have been burned by failures in Washington Hawthorn plantings.
So we are diving into Hawthorn production, despite several failures to grow it from seed over the years. I am seriously considering starting some sort of Hawthorn enthususiast group to help defeat the challenge of growing and deploying the northern Crataegus species. They are so tough that Cattle ranchers consider them a weed species, inside their fenced pastures - & in our overpopulated Deer landscape, that is a handy trait, as the average property owner wants to plant something for wildlife, but then they expect to be able to forget all about it and magic Nature will do the rest. Hawthorn can grant that wish.
The other huge problem Hawthorn has in the commercial marketplace is that it is a very poor choice in landscaping, with an early leaf drop, no fall color, and even poor late summer color (spotted, browning leaves) before the leaves drop. All that is irrelevant to wildlife of course, but it also has discouraged some plant authority type groups from working with me on this concept, as retail residential landscaping drives the Horticulture trade, and concepts of wildlife use are just a minority or completely ignored concern.
Last year I collected a heavily laden, yellow fruited Hawthorn that I haven’t fully identified yet - something that has to be done during flowering for completely accurate species ID. I thought picking a yellow fruited one would narrow the possibilities down from around a dozen-&-a-half potentials in that area, but it turns out a number of species have yellow fruited varietals. However I haven’t been able to find a list of which species can randomly have that in their genetics.
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