May Day, May Day: A history of hawthorn

THE first day of May – or May Day – was always a joyous time, on par with Christmas Day and Easter Sunday, closely tied up with white flowers that hung heavy on the hawthorn tree, called May blossom. Village celebrations were led by a lucky girl chosen to be May Queen or Queen of the May. She wore a white gown to symbolise purity and a tiara or crown of seasonal white flowers, including lily-of-the-valley and, of course, May blossom.

May Day celebrations clearly depend on the availability of May blossom and are governed by the exact timing of spring. May Day’s roots go back to the Celtic festival of Beltane, but May Day has a more modern and less cheerful meaning as an internationally used distress signal in radio communications.

However, with ongoing climate warming and a tendency to earlier springs, ‘Mayday’ may soon be signalled because hawthorn blossom has come and gone by the first day of May.

Spring 2019 was ideal timing for hawthorn blossom and May Day celebrations.

CULTURE AND CLIMATE ON MAY DAY CELEBRATIONS

There was always consternation among modern historians and naturalists unable to square today’s May Day celebration (1 May) with the sure-fire appearance of hawthorn flowers, especially in northern England, but the explanation for this lies in culture and history rather than phenology.

Until 1752, May Day celebrations took place on 12 May, but it was brought forward following the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar. In those times, 12 May would have been a more likely due date for hawthorn blossom.

Advancing the May Day celebrations by 12 days some 270 years ago must have caused problems. I can remember at least one very late spring when common hedgerow hawthorn was generally not in flower on 1 May in southern England. However, a sprinkling of common hawthorn should always be available on the first day of May due to well-established genetic differences even in the same hedgerow, with the odd shrub re-foliating and flowering earlier than the rest.

READ MORE: March of the months and the sweet smell of spring

What’s more, there are two wild native species of hawthorn in the UK. The first and most frequent is Crataegus monogyna, the common hedgerow hawthorn, a native of the northern hemisphere and spread right across Europe and into North Africa and Western Asia.

The second is Crataegus (oxyacanthoides) laevigata (Midland or woodland hawthorn), less common and more likely to be found as a small tree in broadleaf deciduous woodland. There is little definitive to separate the two, although C. laevigata regularly flowers some two weeks earlier, in April. Solitary trees blossoming in woodland alongside blackthorn in mid April are almost certainly pure-line C. laevigata.

However, climate warming and increased frequency of milder winters and earlier springs over the last three decades means a dearth of hawthorn blossom for May Day celebrations is now more likely due to the hawthorn flowers having come and gone. In fact, so early was spring 2020 that hawthorn blossom in southern England was at its best during the second half of April, with the white flowers dead, done and dusted by the first day of May.

May blossom is shown here at its best on 26 April 2020. Another five days of cloudless skies and high temperatures meant the flowers were dead and buried by 1 May.

HAWTHORN’S HEAVY SCENT IN SPRING

Hawthorn in flower is clearly a milestone for spring in more ways than one. Many other trees including crab apple, bird cherry, whitebeam and rowan flower in May, but hawthorn is by far the most widespread tree across the British Isles.

As May unfolds, the days become warmer and you can almost see things grow. The sheer density of hawthorn blossom with crowded clusters of five-petal flowers is unrivalled, whether along the woodland margin, in hedgerows or on the railway or motorway embankment. Branches visibly droop under a heavy mass of white and sometimes pink-tinged flowers, but the physical weight is not the only thing about hawthorn that is heavy and oppressive.

Hawthorn flowers emit an almost putrid scent, loved by some but hated by others. If you like ripe, French cheese then you will love hawthorn because the scents are not dissimilar. However, the heavy lingering odour is not there to tantalise or infuriate the human race, but to draw in dung flies, also attracted by the brown anthers which stand out against the white petals. Dung flies are pollinating insects, to ensure the dense panicles of white, five-petal flowers of spring are transformed into generous bunches of red berries commonly called haws but also pixie pears, cuckoo’s beads and chunky cheese as a feast for the birds in autumn and winter.

Hawthorn is a true paradox of a tree, with scented blossoms to attract pollinating insects and soft berries for the birds, but also armed with wicked thorns. But the thorny nature of hawthorn foliage also has a place in the natural order of things as a nesting site for native birds, including blackbird, chaffinch, brown wren and linnet. Back in the 1950s you could walk the length of a low hawthorn hedge and locate a linnet’s nest every 20 yards or so, easily identified by excess nesting material protruding out of the hedgerow.

Common hedgerow hawthorn is seen here flowering on a dairy farm, but where, exactly? Looks like England on a dull day in April or May, but the Eucalyptus trees tell another story. The time is September 2011 and the place is Mount Barker in the Adelaide Hills in South Australia. Common hedgerow hawthorn was introduced into Australia in the 1800s.

MAGPIES AND HAWTHORN TREES

However, it was a much bigger bird which had the closest and most interesting association with hawthorn hedges. Not the low-cut, well-manicured hedgerows of today but the tall, uncut hawthorn hedges which used to border many fields and arch down in May under the weight of bountiful blossom. This was the magpie, which built its bulky, domed nest with a thorny crown of hawthorn twigs in the tops of these traditional high hedgerows.

READ MORE: April showers and woodland flowers

Up until the mid-19th century, farmers recognised magpies as useful birds which ate harmful insects like leatherjackets and chafer grubs, but the magpie was later regarded as a pest and shot on sight. Magpies’ fortunes across the arable landscape fluctuated during and after the two world wars, finally hitting rock bottom due to the accelerated loss of high hawthorn hedges from the farming landscape during the 1960s.

Dense clusters of flowers are transformed over the summer into bunches of bright red berries.

Magpie numbers rose during the wars, when many young gamekeepers were off shooting enemy soldiers, only to fall drastically again during peacetime. As a boy in the late 1950s, I recall looking for magpies’ nests across Hertfordshire farmland, but with little success. The next two decades saw the farming landscape change out of all recognition, including high hawthorn hedges cut down to size or removed altogether. Now it was time for the magpie to call “Mayday, Mayday”.

Magpies subsequently deserted the countryside around London and by the 1980s had become a suburban species, choosing to nest in all manner of trees in parks and along streets and railway embankments. This year, I have already seen magpies building nests in a 70-year-old horse chestnut street tree and an ash tree planted some 20 years ago in a supermarket car park. Today we are most likely to find tall, uncut hawthorn in the suburbs as a remnant of the 20th-century farming landscape. Hawthorns have been known to live for 400 years and clumps of twisted, old trees can be found in towns as reminders of where old hedgerows were situated.

Common hedgerow hawthorn is clearly revered in Britain, but not always so outside of its native range, where the shrub can be invasive. Crataegus monogyna was introduced into North America and Australasia in the 1800s where it naturalised and subsequently became an environmental weed, especially on the pacific coast of North America and in parts of Australia and New Zealand. Birds may prefer the fruit over those on native plants, thus spreading the species which forms thickets to suppress vegetation.

Beltane is a traditional Gaelic festival held halfway between the vernal equinox and the summer solstice and regarded as the peak of spring and the start of summer. This festival is all about fertility and conception involving the May Queen and the Young Oak King, as Jack-in-the-Green (the Green Man) who falls in love with the May Queen and wins her hand. Now we know why there are still so many ancient inns which carry the name ‘Green Man’. 

Our ancestors traditionally brought back armfuls of hawthorn blossoms to decorate their homes and barns for Beltane, and later for the more contemporary May Day celebrations. Hawthorn was never brought into the home at other times because it was considered to be unlucky. The belief clearly lived on because I distinctly remember being scolded by my grandmother for bringing some unusually early flowering hawthorn into the home before May Day.

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