Long live the May Queen

A mainstay of the hedgerow, a wildlife haven, the queen of the woods: this is the hawthorn’s moment, eulogises Matthew Rice

- Matthew Rice

OF all the trees that are in the wood, perhaps the hawthorn is the queen—the overlooked jewel in the crown. It’s not up there in the sylvan pantheon of oak, ash, and beech, but is it possible that it’s more important?

David Hockney, a more acknowledged national treasure, thinks so. His retrospective at the Royal Academy in 2012 featured a room frothing with coral-crusted hedgerows. Stanley Spencer’s Marsh Meadows, Cookham depicts thick, curded, heavy-skirted May trees centre stage; Samuel Palmer’s thorns are cauliflower-thick with bloom. These three most English of English landscape painters know their onions and their work records the visual importance of the humble hawthorn.

The hawthorn is the mainstay of the British hedge. Blackthorn, despite its sloes, is simply too thorny. Beech is somehow too suburban and the others—field maple, holly, ash, and the rest—have more fulfilled lives elsewhere. The May, however, is the doyenne of hedge trees. It bends to the hedge layer, thickens like a thorny Hydra when trimmed, and is fast-growing, hence its third name of quickthorn.

It’s adaptable, surviving pollution in urban conditions and thriving on acid moorland, alkaline downlands or limestone uplands. The Derbyshire thorn, native to the Pennine peaks, flowers pink and in its double form is characteristic of city-park planting. The Crataegus family has many more cousins, with berries bigger, in smaller panicles or with leaves simpler or more serrated. All share the desirable property of turning brightly and dramatically early in the autumn.