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Xviii. Douglasianae

Black Haw (C. Douglasii, Lindl.)--Round-headed tree, 30 to 40 feet high, or many-stemmed shrub, with slender, stiff twigs. Thorns stout, acute, 3/4 to 1 inch long, red, becoming grey. Bark red-brown in oblong, scaly plates. Wood hard, tough, heavy, rose coloured, with satiny grain. Buds blunt, 1/8 inch long, scaly, shining, brown. Leaves obovate to oblong-ovate, acute, finely serrate, on irregular incised lobes; occasionally with two deep sinuses nearly cutting the blade in two; base tapering to short, stout petiole; smooth, dark green, leathery, paler beneath; 1 to 4 inches long. Flowers, May, 1/3 to 1/2 inch across, in leafy cymes; stamens 20, anthers pale, small; styles 2 to 5, short. Fruits black, ripe in August to September, soon falling, globose or oblong, in many-fruited clusters, lustrous, 1/2 inch long; flesh thin, sweet; nutlets slightly grooved on back and front. Preferred habitat, moist soil of coast and stream borders. Distribution, coast of Puget Sound, Oregon, and California; east on mountains to Montana and Idaho, and south to Colorado and New Mexico. Occurs also in the upper peninsula of Michigan.

This black-fruited thorn tree of the West has been successfully introduced into cultivation in the Eastern States, and proves hardy along the Atlantic seaboard to Nova Scotia. It is well worth cultivating wherever it will grow.

The English Hawthorn (C. Oxyacantha, Linn.) is the best known Crataegus in the world. It grows wild in Asia and Europe, and when it first came into cultivation no man knows. Englishmen will tell you it has always formed the hedgerows of their snug little island, and the sweetness of the blossoms will be one of the last things to fade from the exile's memory. Snowy white, and pink and rose coloured, the "blossoming May" turns the whole countryside into a garden, with linnets and skylarks filling the fields and lanes with music. "Oh! to be in England, now that April's there!" Browning's poetry is sometimes obscure, but here is a line that needs no explanatory note for any of his countrymen.

The leaf of the English hawthorn is deeply cut, like our parsley haw, in the type species. But this species we shall rarely see. It has been so long in cultivation that the improved horticultural varieties are legion. These are much in evidence in American gardens, where they are usually grown as single specimens, for their showy flowers and coral-red fruits.