Three-flower Hawthorn

Size, growth and what to expect

No source rates its growth, so our growth estimator treats it as a medium grower, like most of our hawthorns, about a foot and a half a year. It is a shrub with one to several stems, usually 3 to 6 feet tall in the wild and up to 20. Seedlings can flower at four years, when they stand about 3 feet tall.

White flowers about an inch across, with many yellow stamens, open from late April into early May, and in Louisiana as early as March. They come in clusters of two to seven, most often three, and the middle one opens first. The fruit is a round red haw about half an inch across, ripe from September into November, with juicy orange flesh. Birds eat it and spread the seed.

Its home is moist wooded ravines and slopes over limestone, open woods on limy clay, and the edges of prairies. In Louisiana it grows with Durand oak, parsley hawthorn, cockspur hawthorn and fragrant sumac. It crosses with Ashe's hawthorn and other hawthorns where they meet.

How to grow Three-flower Hawthorn

Three-flower hawthorn grows best in light shade, or in full sun where the soil stays moist, because strong sun with drought stresses it badly. Give it a soil over limestone or a limy clay that is moist but never wet. Its thorns grow up to 2 inches long and are often branched, so keep it back from paths. Set plants 10 feet apart, and keep each one 10 feet from a wall. It is small enough to grow within 15 feet of overhead wires.

Saplings ship bare-root or potted. Plant them dormant, from leaf fall until bud swell, in a hole wider than the roots and no deeper. Set the crown at the soil line, put the native soil back in, and keep the mulch clear of the stems. Clean the seed from the ripe fruit, and sow it outdoors in fall. It sprouts best after a winter in the cold ground.

Water weekly through the first summer, and in dry spells for the next two. Deer browse hawthorn leaves and twigs and rabbits gnaw young bark, so cage young plants for their first three years. Its roots sprout again after it is cut back or burned, as long as the sprouts get light.

Most three-flower hawthorns carry three or four sets of chromosomes, and hawthorns like them usually set seed with their own pollen, so one plant can bear alone. Bees and beetles visit the flowers. Like other hawthorns it can suffer from fungal and bacterial diseases and insect pests. Cedar-apple rust, a fungus that spends part of its life on eastern redcedar, is its main disease, so keep it away from redcedars.