Crataegus heterophylla
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| Various-leaved Hawthorn | ||||||||||||||||
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 Illustration from The Botanical Register (1828)
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| Crataegus heterophylla Flugge |
Crataegus heterophylla, known as the Various-leaved Hawthorn, is a small tree of about 3 m in height, sometimes up to 10 m; often semi-evergreen in character, with unusually variable leaves for a hawthorn. Some leaves are entirely smooth-edged, or have just a few (sometimes three) teeth at the apex only. These leaves are oblong, or ovate in shape. The same tree also bears more sharply pointed, deeply lobed leaves. The former leaf types can be found on the flowering shoots; the latter on the barren ones. All the leaves are glossy, dark green in colour, and quite glabrous.
This hawthorn has been in cultivation in European and American parks and gardens since the early nineteenth century. It is thought by some to be a hybrid between the Common Hawthorn and another species, perhaps the Azarole Hawthorn. It is considered to be a beautiful tree for gardens, bearing a rich glossy foliage sometimes during winter months (semi-evergreen), and many fruit.
In the UK the author W.J.Bean in Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles (1914; edited and reprinted 1996) comments that 'It is a beautiful thorn of the Oxyacantha group, bearing its large flowers and bright fruits freely. It is also one of the most distinct by reason of its variously shaped leaves, its long, narrow fruits, and the absence of down from the younger parts.'
Its country of origin is uncertain, and if it is of hybrid origin it may have arisen more than once. However early ideas that it originated in North America are now generally discounted in view of its apparent eastern European origin. Favouring an American origin were Joseph Paxton, who listed the hawthorn in his Pocket Botanical Dictionary of 1840, as having been introduced into Britain from N.America in 1816; also A. P. de Candolle who published its country of origin as North America in his Podromus. By contrast an eastern European origin was proposed by Peter William Watson who became the first to publish a botanical description and drawing in the UK based on examination of a live example. His figure in Dendrologia Britannica: trees and shrubs that will live in the open air of Britain 1825, was taken from a tree at Loddiges nursery in Hackney who had by now obtained seed from correspondents. Watson noted that the various-leaved hawthorn had similarities with the eastern European Azarole and named it C.aronia, though his name was not accepted. John Lindley was given specimens by Loddiges of the very tree Watson had described. He too considered it to have little affinity with North American hawthorns, being closer to eastern European species, and suggested it could be a relative of an Azarole hawthorn that had been described by Persoon under the name C.maroccana. In 1827 Lindley drew a specimen of various-leaved hawthorn (which had been grafted onto a common hawthorn rootstock in the Horticultural Society Garden, to give it added vigour) and published this the following year with his description in the Botanical Register. In the early twentieth century W.J.Bean described it similarly, as a native of Armenia.
Today other authors also list it as native to Eastern Europe from Georgia and the Caucasus to nearby parts of Asia. Today mature specimens of the Various-leaved Hawthorn can be seen in England where it has been formally planted, as at the Royal Victoria Park in Bath; and in some places where it has naturalised, the most extensive such place being Abney Park Cemetery in London where it was planted long ago by Loddiges in an early Victorian garden cemetery arboretum.
The tree was first described scientifically by the botanist Flugge, in a French periodical, Annales du Museum d'Histoire Naturelle - a journal that began to be published in Paris in 1802, and continued in print until its twentieth volume in 1813. In England the Various-leaved Hawthorn was first described in a scientific publication by the botanist P.W.Watson, but it is John Lindley's description that is better known, and which used Flugge's name C.heterophylla as we do today. This appeared in Edwards's Botanical Register in 1828 (plate 1161); a periodical that had been originated by Sydenham Edwards in London in 1815 as Edwards's Botanical Register, before Lindley took over its editorship.
[edit] References
- Bean, W.J. (1914);1996 edn. "Trees & Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles"
- Paxton, Joseph (1840). "Pocket Botanical Dictionary"
