Hawthorn

Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna) is called the May tree because it blooms in May and for almost no other reason — but that single calendar fact has generated more British and Irish folklore than any other plant except, possibly, the elder. The tree was dressed in garlands, danced around, and gathered at dawn on May morning. Bringing its blossom indoors, however, was considered one of the worst things you could do with a plant in a domestic space. This article keeps those two facts separate, traces both to their sources, and notes where the folklore is demonstrably old and where it is Victorian or later.

The herb

Crataegus monogyna (common hawthorn) is a dense, thorny shrub or small tree, widespread across Britain, Ireland, and most of Europe. Its relative Crataegus laevigata (midland hawthorn) is earlier-blooming by a week or two and tolerates heavier shade; it was probably more common in the early medieval landscape before widespread hedgerow planting. The word haw derives from the Old English hage, meaning hedge — the tree’s primary agricultural role for centuries was as a living stock-proof barrier, and the Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth century planted millions of new hawthorn hedgerows across England.

Pollen records place hawthorn in Britain from at least 6,000 BC. It is, in the fullest sense, a native.

The flowers are white (occasionally pink), five-petalled, carried in dense flat clusters, and they smell — something that will recur through every strand of hawthorn folklore.

The May tree and Beltane

The association between hawthorn and the first of May runs through English literature from at least the medieval period. The tree flowers at that time of year — on the old Julian calendar, reliably so; after the calendar reform of 1752, which removed eleven days from the year, the blossom shifted to the middle of May, so that May Day and the full flowering no longer coincided. Folk memory carried the connection anyway.

The May bush was a central feature of the celebration: leafy branches were cut and set upright outside houses, decorated with local wildflowers and sometimes eggshells or other ornaments. Distinct from this was “going a-Maying” — young people going out before dawn, gathering hawthorn blossom, and returning home with it. The seventeenth-century poet Robert Herrick documented the custom directly:

There’s not a budding boy or girl this day, But is got up and gone to bring in May; A deal of youth ere this is come Back, with whitethorn laden home.

That lines up with the folk-magic purpose: the gathering was the point, and the blossom was brought back to be used outdoors, fixed to the doorway or left in the lane — not placed inside the house.

Ronald Hutton, in Stations of the Sun (1996), provides the most careful historical account of May Day custom in Britain. He makes a defensible case for Beltane as a genuine pre-Christian fire festival in parts of the British Isles and Ireland — the evidence there is real, even if later folk claims about it tend to accumulate — while cautioning against reading every May custom as a pagan survival. The hawthorn’s role in May Day is solidly documented from the sixteenth century onward; what it means before that requires more caution than most retellings apply.

The fairy thorn

Across Ireland and parts of Scotland, a hawthorn standing alone in a field — the lone bush or lone thorn — was considered to be under fairy protection. Such trees could not be cut, damaged, or built against without incurring serious misfortune. The belief is so persistent that it continues to affect civil engineering decisions: work on the main Limerick–Galway road was interrupted in 1999 because a lone hawthorn stood in the planned route. In County Tyrone in 2009, a hawthorn tree was cut down and locals reported the release of a presence that had been confined beneath it.

These are modern instances. The underlying belief is older. Thomas the Rhymer, the thirteenth-century Scottish mystic, was said to have met the Faery Queen beneath a hawthorn while a cuckoo called; she led him into the fairy underworld, and when he returned he had been absent for seven years. The hawthorn as a threshold tree — standing between the ordinary world and the otherworld — appears consistently in Scottish and Irish material.

In Irish tradition the term most commonly used for such trees is sceach (whitethorn), or more obliquely the gentle bush, since naming the fairies directly was considered impolitic. “Sentry thorns” were said to guard holy wells and ancient sites; the tree was left standing when everything else around it was cleared.

What is worth noting about this strand of the folklore is that it is largely apotropaic and cautionary: the tree demands respect by not being interfered with, rather than demanding offerings or rites. This is different in character from the active festive use at Beltane, and the two traditions probably have different roots.

The indoor taboo

Here is the contradiction at the centre of hawthorn folklore: the blossom was gathered in public celebration on May morning and yet carrying it into the house was considered an invitation to death.

When the Folklore Society conducted its survey of unlucky plants between March 1982 and October 1984, May blossom — flowering hawthorn — was the most frequently reported inauspicious plant, accounting for 23.5% of all material received. That figure is from Roy Vickery’s Unlucky Plants (1985), the survey’s published results. More than twice as many responses named hawthorn as named the second-most-reported plant. Vickery’s archive at plant-lore.com preserves individual testimonies from this period and after: “I was always told it was unlucky to bring may (hawthorn) into the house — never told what the bad luck would be” (Yorkshire-rooted informant, Streatham, 2010); “According to my mother, who was from the superstitious North, hawthorn should never be brought indoors as it was unlucky having provided the material for Christ’s crown of thorns” (East Sheen, 1998). The Christian gloss on the last example is a late overlay; the core prohibition spans both Catholic and Protestant areas and predates any tidy theological explanation.

The belief is older than the Victorian collectors. Francis Bacon, writing in Sylva Sylvarum in 1627, described hawthorn as smelling like the plague. A note in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1866 recorded that country cottagers identified the scent of hawthorn blossom as “exactly like the smell of the Great Plague of London.” In 1900 the botanist R.P. Murray observed that Crataegus laevigata — the midland hawthorn — produced flowers that “absolutely stink of putrid flesh” shortly after being gathered indoors.

The chemical basis for all of this was identified more recently. Hawthorn blossom contains trimethylamine — a volatile amine that is also one of the first compounds produced by decomposing animal tissue. The smell is distinctive enough to attract carrion flies as pollinators. To anyone accustomed to laying out their dead at home for a week before burial, or to keeping unrefrigerated meat in a small room, the scent entering a domestic space with an armful of hawthorn blossom would have registered as the smell of something rotting. The taboo has a plausible sensory mechanism, independent of any supernatural explanation.

Vickery notes on plant-lore.com that C. laevigata is probably the stronger culprit: it blooms earlier than C. monogyna and its cut flowers develop the putrid note faster. It may also have been more commonly available for early May Day gathering before common hawthorn hedgerows became ubiquitous.

One further explanation circulated among Victorian-era commentators — that the indoor taboo reflected “unregulated love in the fields rather than conjugal love in the bed,” the association between May Day licence and the hawthorn blossom. Vickery notes this theory without endorsing it. The chemistry is the more parsimonious explanation.

Old versus recently collected

A practitioner wanting to gauge how deep any piece of hawthorn folklore runs should apply a simple test: can you find it before 1800?

The fairy thorn tradition is genuinely old. The Thomas the Rhymer material is medieval; the Irish lone-bush tradition appears in early modern texts; and the belief was active enough in the nineteenth century to be collected systematically across the island. The modern road-diversion stories are not “new” beliefs — they are the same belief, still functioning.

The May bush and going a-Maying are documented from the sixteenth century at minimum, with literary attestation from the seventeenth. Hutton places May Day custom in continuity with genuine early seasonal observance, though he is careful to note that specific claims about pre-Christian origins require case-by-case evidence.

The indoor taboo is attested at least to 1627 (Bacon) and probably earlier; the Victorian and twentieth-century collectors found it still vigorous. It is one of the more robustly documented items in British plant-lore.

What the Victorian collectors added, and what has filtered into modern witchcraft through mid-twentieth-century revival writers, is a synthetic “meaning” system that assigns hawthorn correspondence values in tables. These are recent constructions, not folk inheritance. Worth knowing, in the same way it is worth knowing the midsummer/moon disagreement in mugwort’s correspondence tables.

Correspondences in modern practice

For reference — not as folklore evidence — hawthorn appears in contemporary practice as:

• Season: Beltane / May Day
• Element: fire (from Beltane associations) or air (from later eclectic sources)
• Powers: protection, fairy-working, threshold magic, fertility, cleansing
• Use: May bushes, door-garlands, Beltane fire materials; protective charm for the threshold; avoided as cut blossom indoors

The outdoor/indoor split in the older folklore is worth preserving in practice: hawthorn as threshold and boundary belongs outside, or on the doorstep. The modern convention of stuffing blossom into a vase on the kitchen table runs against the entire weight of the British and Irish record.

Safety

No significant toxicity at normal contact or ingestion of haws. Crataegus berries are widely used in herbal medicine for cardiovascular support. The blossom is edible; young leaves (“bread and cheese”) were commonly eaten as a hedge-side nibble. The thorns are the practical hazard — they are sharp enough to puncture skin and cause infection if a wound goes unclean.

Harvest identification note: C. monogyna has single-seeded haws; C. laevigata has two-seeded haws. Both are hawthorn.

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Cross-references: Beltane — Hutton on the fire festival evidence. Rowan — for comparison with another British protective tree-spirit tradition.