Hawthorn Tree

Hawthorn bewitched us with its flower beauty in Spring 2025, and now we enjoy the cardinal red of the haws.

Sep 08, 2025

Can anyone recall a year when the hawthorn trees were just so fine?

Our hedgerows in 2025 have been bouquets of exuberant whiteness, cricket-flannel-white with hawthorn flowers, followed by lush baroque reds of plump haw berries as we move into autumn.

But there is much, much more to the hawthorn than just a perimeter-defining spectral glow in white and red.

For instance: how do you fancy a hawthorn and nettle tikki chaat? That’s one of the specials that chef Gautham Iyer cooked up in his pop-up, Iyer’s X O’Sho, in Cork city.

In Gautham’s words the dish is: “Two spiced potato patties, flavoured with foraged nettle and hawthorn on a bed of chickpea chole, beansprouts, salad, cucumber, onion, carrot and pomegranate.”

Yes. And yes again.

And here’s the hawthorn thing: hawthorn is good for your heart, “including coronary artery disease, angina, hypertension and heart failure,” notes Peter Wyse Jackson.

For Gautham Iyer, hawthorn is “one of our greatest medicines… its beauty and spirit touches and opens even the coldest of hearts.”

Hawthorn has been bewitching us with its flowering beauty and its autumnal cherub-like plumpness. But, if the tree giveth, then the tree also taketh away.

Misfortune follows if you mess with a hawthorn tree.

Irish folklore is abundant in tales of how the hawthorn punished those who try to fell it. You might scoff at this as old wives tales, but consider the story of the De Lorean car factory, in Belfast, in the 1970’s.

According to the forester Ben Simon, when the plant was being built at Dunmurry, the workmen left the ground around a hawthorn tree untouched, and refused payments from management to remove it. And then, one morning, the tree was gone – local talk has it that John De Lorean himself did the deed.

The first De Lorean cars were built at the end of 1980, but by 1982 the cars were a commercial failure and the enterprise filed for bankruptcy, just a few days after De Lorean’s arrest on drug trafficking charges.

Don’t mess with the hawthorn tree.

The Thorn - Hawthorn is just one of its names - is a gnarled, stubbly tree that, whatever its age, never seems to reach its full growth potential. Wherever you choose to grow it, it's a tree you cannot tame. It always retains the spirit of the wild, bending with the prevailing wind, curling up around itself, protecting its centre.

It is this defensive characteristic that has given it the herbalist signature of the Heart, and explains why its leaves, flowers and berries have historically been used as a medicine to treat cardiac conditions.

In ancient times this was a tree of revelry and potency, a sacred tree that symbolised renewed life, fertility and union. It became our faerie tree, the shrub that we adorned with ribbons and rags and fragments of our clothing, a gift for the fairy folk that dwelled in the tree.

But then things changed for the Hawthorn. As puritanical religion took a stronger hold, the May Tree was no longer a symbol of joy and beginning. Instead it came to represent abandonment, misfortune and bad luck. No longer a symbol of revelry, it was used to promote abstinence and chastity. Marriages were forbidden during the hawthorn month of May.

Hawthorn seems to have been born old and wise. Perhaps that’s why so many legends remain: Hang May flowers in your barn to increase milk yield from your cows ... Carry one of its thorns in your pocket and you will catch more fish ... Don't use it to decorate your house, or death awaits ...

And, of course, something your granny may very well have told you: Ne’er cast a clout till May be out … The May here is the May blossom of the hawthorn, not the month of May.

We still have some ways to go to fully exploit Hawthorn in a culinary sense, despite the fact that it has a delightful nutty flavour. The berries, or Haws as they are called, have been used in jellies, but that's often as far as it goes.

Way back when, hawthorn buds and leaves were eaten and known as “bread-and-cheese” and Cyril and Kit O Ceirin, in their path-breaking book “Wild and Free” mention that the young leaves are very fine used in a salad. They also noted that a Hawthorn Blossom wine was reputed to have been produced in the Newport district of County Tipperary. We’d be up for that.