How to recognise and pick hawthorn
Growing up I had never seen or heard about a hawthorn, mainly because in the Netherlands there aren’t that many. But in Ireland, they are everywhere. You see them in the parks, and next to the roads, sometimes they’re thin and small and other times tall and unruly. But the blossom makes the whole countryside come alive, the clusters of white flowers that filled every nook and cranny. Later I saw the berries and wondered if I could eat them. Turns out you can!
Hawthorn in Irish folklore
Even though most Irish adults don’t believe in faeries, most children do. In the parks and forests, you often see parents telling their children about faeries and encouraging them to leave some sort of offering. When you realise that even in these unbelieving times, there are still parents telling their kids about faeries. You start to understand why hawthorn shrubs are still a subject of superstition.
Because one of the old beliefs regarding the hawthorn has a connection to faeries. They believed that the faeries planted and used some hawthorns that would grow in the middle of fields. And since the Irish faeries aren’t anything like Tinkerbell they would demand respect. For if you did not do so, they could make your life miserable.
Another thing that made the Irish of old, regard the hawthorn with a mixture of trepidation and respect, has to do with the 1st day of May and Halloween. Because it just starts to flower, on the 1st day of May or Bealtaine and the berries are ripe for picking around the time of Halloween or Samhain. The berries are also so vibrantly red that you can’t help but notice the hawthorn during the autumn months.
How to identify
Hawthorn is usually grown in hedges, and you can quite often see them growing in rows together with other prickly hedge plants. They look like a mixture of a tree and a bush, sometimes more tree-like than other times. But always unruly looking and with an abundance of leaves. The leaves themselves have 5 to 7 lobes, and the edges can be slightly serrated. I also find them to rather on the small side for shrubs that can grow that big.
In spring, they have small white pinkish flowers that have 5 petals. The flowers don’t have a very appealing scent and tend to attract flies, although some others find the smell very pleasant and reminiscent of almonds.
Then as the summer goes by, the red berries start to appear and swell. By the time autumn comes around, and the leaves start to change colour, the berries really start to become noticeable. They remind me somewhat of rosehips, which is explained by the fact that the shrubs are both related to each other. Unless you pick them or the birds eat them, you can enjoy the berries all through the winter.
By wintertime, you will be able to notice the bark rather well and see that it’s slightly grayish brown. The hawthorn has tiny cracks on the surface, which is perfect for small insects. It is also in wintertime that you can really see just how big the thorns are on a hawthorn. They almost look like twigs that have been sharpened to a point, and they are quite painful if you’re unaware.
How to pick hawthorn berries
When you want to pick hawthorn berries, be sure to wear some leather gloves to protect your hands from the big thorns.
But apart from making sure that you won’t go home with any wounds you might also want to make sure you can actually harvest the berries. For myself, the biggest frustration when foraging is the fact that I’m vertically challenged, meaning that I’m rather short. So either take a tall friend with you, or some sort of crook to make sure you can reach those beckoning branches far up.
Then the question is where to put them in, a plastic bag, a cotton bag, a woven basket or a lunch box. Personally, I really like to use an old ice cream container. You can put them on the bottom of your tote bag, and close each one when you’ve filled it. I also feel a bit less peculiar when I’m walking with a bag on my shoulder as apposed to a basket. And since I’m going to clean the fruit as soon I’m home anyway, there is no risk of the fruit rotting in the airtight plastic container.
Hawthorn in the kitchen
I’ve not seen any records of people eating the berries raw. But then again when foraging for berries was still considered a mundane thing people always cooked all their fruit. Nonetheless, I would recommend just cooking the berries or fermenting them.
You can use the fruit to make some hedgerow jam. You just add different berries that you’ve picked on your foraging expeditions. Just like any jam, you use 50/50 fruit to sugar. If you’re afraid that the jam won’t set, add some apple peels and cores to add some pectin. You can just boil those peels and cores, and then use that water to cook your fruit in.
If you would like some hawthorn berry flavoured liqueur, you can add a couple handfuls of berries to an old jam jar. To the jar you add a couple tablespoons of sugar and top it off with a strong liqueur of choice, like vodka or whiskey.
Or if you would like to brew your own wine, you could even use the berries and let them ferment into some country wine. If you would like to learn more about brewing your own beverages then read my post about brewing mead.
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