Listen to more stories on the Noa app. Updated at p. Last summer, he visited again for the first time in 25 years. All that was left was a field of fescue grass. Only a couple dozen hawthorns remained. Lance is a caretaker of a nature preserve in North Carolina and an expert on hawthorn trees. The species Crataegus lancei is named after him.
A century ago, the trees were all over the eastern landscape. Now finding one anywhere is hard. One Missouri botanist, Justin Thomas, told me they were functionally extinct in his region. Until the s, hawthorn trees were believed to be a simple taxonomic group, known to science as Crataegus. North America had 10 recognized species. Suddenly, from to , the number of species exploded, and finding new hawthorns became a competitive sport.
Out of those 1,, many were the same species being named differently by botanists working independently. But the particular features of the trees themselves could mislead scientists, or at least those inclined to be misled. A history of hawthorns includes a blind item about a botanist known for his hawthorn obsession, who was once asked by a group of college women to identify three specimens.
After he declared them three distinct species based on leaf shape, the women revealed that all three specimens came from the same tree. The botanistβwho was almost certainly Charles S. Today, most sources recognize anywhere from 22 to hawthorn species in eastern North America.
Whatever the true count, the trees take a vertiginous number of forms in nature. Part of the difficulty in identifying hawthorn species is their bizarre reproductive habits.
