How to Know the Wild Flowers

The book that taught America botany by color: find your flower under White, Yellow, Pink or Blue, and read its name, its haunts and its folklore — the first field guide organized the way people actually look.

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Hawthorn. White-Thorn

Crataegus coccinea. Rose Family.

A shrub or small tree, with spreading branches, and stout thorns or spines. Leaves.--On slender leaf-stalks; thin; rounded; toothed, sometimes lobed. Flowers.--White or sometimes reddish; rather large; clustered; with a somewhat disagreeable odor. Calyx.--Urn-shaped; five-cleft. Corolla.--Of five broad, rounded petals. Stamens.--Five to ten, or many. Pistil.--One, with one to five styles. Fruit.--Coral-red.

The flowers of the white-thorn appear in spring, at the same time with those of many of the dogwoods. Its scarlet fruit gleams from the thicket in September.

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