Hawthorn Flower Meaning: Hope in Three Victorian Books, an Indoors Taboo, and the Fairy Bush a 1999 Bypass Went Around
Hawthorn flower means hope in three Victorian books. Folklore adds May Day, an indoors taboo, an Irish fairy bush and Missouri’s state flower.
In short
- Hawthorn flower means hope in the Victorian language of flowers: Greenaway, Tyas and an 1884 New York dictionary all say so.
- Folklore adds May Day garlands, a taboo on bringing blossom indoors, and lone “fairy” trees in Ireland.
- Missouri’s state flower is the hawthorn (genus Crataegus), by a law signed on 16 March 1923.
- Checked against: RHS, Woodland Trust, Missouri Secretary of State, Irish Times.
Hawthorn flower means hope in the Victorian language of flowers, and the tree carries older and darker meanings in British and Irish folklore. “Hawthorn” names a whole genus, Crataegus. The common hawthorn of European hedgerows is Crataegus monogyna, which the Royal Horticultural Society also lists under the name “may”. Our May birth flowers guide covers hawthorn’s place beside lily of the valley. This page goes further: the colour of the blossom, Missouri’s state flower, the Tudor badge, the Glastonbury Thorn, and an Irish fairy bush that a 1999 bypass plan worked around. Every symbolic reading here is presented as tradition, not fact, and each section says which texts I read to check it.
What does the hawthorn flower mean?
Hawthorn flower means hope in the Victorian language of flowers. Kate Greenaway’s Language of Flowers lists “Hawthorn: Hope”, and its reverse index gives “Hope: Hawthorn”. Robert Tyas’s 1869 book heads its entry “Hawthorn… Hope”. An 1884 New York edition, The Language of Flowers, including Floral Poetry, gives the same single word. I read all three entries, and none of them splits the meaning by colour.
Tyas explains the meaning with the season, not with a legend. He writes that no tree or shrub is watched more closely in early spring than the hawthorn, and that its blossom arrives while “all Nature has been rousing herself into active life”. The 1884 dictionary adds three claims about other peoples and names no source for any of them: the Greeks deemed the hawthorn a fortunate tree, the Romans carried it at marriages, and the Turks read a branch as a request for a kiss. Treat these as Victorian retellings. The Roman claim does not match the one classical text I read. In Ovid’s Fasti, Book 6 (Frazer’s translation), a white thorn guards doors and, in a second scene, a cradle against screech-birds, and weddings appear only in the choice of June dates for marriage. Smithsonian Gardens makes the wider point that meanings and traditions change across time and culture, and that the flowers of the Victorian era no longer have the meanings they once did.
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The table sorts each tradition by what stands behind it. Hope is the firmest entry because three books state it. Everything else is a custom, a legend or a belief.
| Tradition | What it holds | What stands behind it |
|---|---|---|
| Victorian floriography | Hawthorn means hope | Greenaway, Tyas (1869) and an 1884 New York dictionary all list it |
| May Day | Blossom gathered for garlands and May bushes; the tree marks the start of summer | Chaucer’s “a-Maying” lines as quoted by Tyas; Irish May bushes described by RTÉ. The Woodland Trust’s “pagan symbol of fertility” reading names no source |
| Irish and Scottish fairy tree | A lone hawthorn belongs to the fairies and must not be cut | Irish Times reports from Clare in 1999; Schools’ Collection stories (via RTÉ); Thomas the Rhymer (via Trees for Life) |
| Bad luck indoors | Blossom in the house brings illness or death | Folklore Society survey, early 1980s: 23% of unlucky-plant items named hawthorn (via Trees for Life) |
| Christian: Glastonbury Thorn | A thorn grew from Joseph of Arimathea’s staff and flowers at Christmas | Abbey-promoted legend first written around 1520 (University of Reading) |
| Tudor badge | A crown found in a hawthorn bush at Bosworth made it a royal emblem | The badge is documented in stained glass (Met Museum); the crown story is tradition |
| Roman door charm | A white thorn guards doors and cradles | Ovid, Fasti 6; the translator’s note reads the plant as whitethorn or buckthorn |
Hawthorn and May Day
Hawthorn is called May because it blossoms around that month, and the blossom itself is the “may” of May Day customs. Phrase Finder notes that the tree is known as the May tree, and that the name “haw” comes from the Old English hage, meaning hedge. The Woodland Trust calls hawthorn a pagan symbol of fertility with ancient associations with May Day, and says it was the ancestor of the Maypole. It gives no source for that lineage, so it stays in the tradition column.
The written record is mostly poetry, from lines Tyas attributes to Chaucer to Herrick in the 17th century. Tyas quotes Chaucer on the custom of going a-Maying, when the court went out “to fetch the flowirs freshe, and braunche and bloome, / And namely Hawthorne brought both page and groome”. He also quotes Herrick’s line that the young came back “with white thorn laden home”. In Ireland, RTÉ Brainstorm describes the custom of cutting a hawthorn branch and decorating this “May bush” with eggshells and flowers, and ties the tree to Bealtaine on 1 May.
Hawthorn now usually flowers around the middle of May, not on 1 May. Trees for Life says the tree now flowers around the middle of the month, and that it flowered much nearer the beginning before Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752. RTÉ makes the same point for Ireland: before the change, hawthorn would have been in full flower in most parts in time for Bealtaine Eve. The Woodland Trust’s Nature’s Calendar gives an expected first-flowering range of early April to late May, with records starting in 1753. The calendar explanation is the sources’ reading, and I found no study that tests it.
The proverb “Ne’er cast a clout till May be out” shows the same ambiguity. A clout is a piece of clothing. The Woodland Trust says the saying “almost certainly refers to the opening of hawthorn flowers rather than the end of the month”. Phrase Finder reaches the opposite conclusion: the earliest citation is Thomas Fuller’s Gnomologia (1732), and an 1855 Whitby Gazette version names “the month of May”. The two sources disagree, so read the proverb as clothing advice that may or may not name the tree.
Why was hawthorn blossom unlucky indoors?
Hawthorn blossom was said to bring illness or death into a house, and hawthorn topped one survey of unlucky plants. Trees for Life reports that in the early 1980s the Folklore Society’s survey of “unlucky” plants found that 23% of the items referred to hawthorn, more than twice as many as the second most unlucky plant. The Woodland Trust gives the belief as illness and death following blossom brought inside. RTÉ writes that the Irish Schools’ Collection stories forbade above all bringing the flowers into the home. Outdoors was different: Trees for Life says May bushes stood outside houses and decorating outside was allowed.
The usual explanation is the smell. The Woodland Trust and Trees for Life both say the blossom contains trimethylamine, a chemical also formed in decaying animal tissue, and the Woodland Trust adds that in medieval times people said the blossom smelled like the Great Plague. The Pherobase, a database of published scent studies, lists trimethylamine among the floral volatiles reported for Crataegus monogyna by Robertson and colleagues in Phytochemistry in 1993, so the compound is in the literature. RTÉ names a different amine, triethylamine, and says it attracts carrion insects, so the sources do not agree on the compound. None of them cites a study that tests whether the smell produced the taboo. It is a later explanation for an older belief.
Trees for Life offers a second possibility: some of the folklore may have started with Midland hawthorn (Crataegus laevigata), which it says gives off a much more unpleasant scent soon after cutting and blooms slightly earlier. Our May birth flowers guide has a note on hawthorn as a cut flower.
The Irish fairy tree, and the bypass that went around one
In Irish tradition a lone hawthorn standing in a field is a fairy tree. RTÉ’s Marion McGarry says there are tens of thousands of these single trees across Ireland, known as gentry thorns, lone bushes or skeaghs, and that the ones which grew unplanted are “those most regarded with fear and superstition”. She adds that the Ogham letter for hawthorn, huath, is thought to mean “fear”. In Scotland, Trees for Life tells the story of Thomas the Rhymer, who met the Faery Queen by a hawthorn and came back to find seven years had passed.
One modern case is documented in the Irish Times. On 17 May 1999 the paper, reporting the Clare Champion, wrote that destroying a fairy thorn at Latoon for Clare County Council’s £100 million bypass of Newmarket-on-Fergus and Ennis “could result in misfortune or even death for those travelling the proposed new road”. The warning came from the folklorist Eddie Lenihan. Twelve days later the Irish Times reported that the county engineer, Tom Carey, had found the bush could stay: “it is in a location where it is possible to work around it”. It would be part of the bypass landscaping and not affected by earth-moving. That is a design change around one tree, not a reroute of the road. Lenihan said he was “happy people have seen sense”, but he could not stop the council clearing trees at a ring-fort at Ballycasey, which he had also warned about.
The bush’s story continued. The Irish Times reported in June 2003 that a vandal with a chain-saw had cut off its branches the previous August, and that it had put out leaves again eight months later. Lenihan’s comment was “The fairies are able to look after their own property.” The same report says motorists travelling along the bypass could see its new leaves. I found no other news report of a road being rerouted for a hawthorn, so Latoon is the one case this page relies on.
The Glastonbury Thorn: the hawthorn said to flower at Christmas
Trees for Life calls the Holy Thorn of Glastonbury Britain’s most famous hawthorn, and it is the best-known hawthorn story in this guide. The University of Reading’s Glastonbury Abbey Archaeology project says the first mention of a flowering thorn at Glastonbury tied to Joseph of Arimathea comes in The Lyfe of Joseph d’Arimathie, composed around 1520, which Abbot Beere probably was responsible for as part of his effort to promote Joseph’s link with the abbey. In that story the thorn grew from Joseph’s staff on Wearyall Hill, and the tree was believed miraculous because it blossomed twice a year, at Easter and Christmas. The project says the story became hugely popular in the 17th century.
Horticulture gives a smaller version of the miracle. The RHS describes the cultivar Crataegus monogyna ‘Biflora’ as coming into leaf early in mild winters and “sometimes” producing an early flush of white flowers, smaller than the main late-spring bloom. The University of Reading Herbarium adds that the tree will not grow from seeds or cuttings and can only be grafted onto common hawthorn, and that each tree lives for around 100 years. A tree that lives about a century cannot be the original of a legend placed in the first century, so every Glastonbury Thorn alive is a later descendant.
The herbarium also repeats two further traditions. One is that a soldier of Cromwell’s cut down the original in the Civil War and was blinded in one eye by a thorn. The other is that a sprig of the winter blossom has been presented to the British monarch every Christmas for centuries.
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→ View My Garden CalendarThe Tudor hawthorn badge
The 1884 New York dictionary says the Tudors assumed the hawthorn as their especial insignia, in remembrance of the crown they gained at Bosworth being found hanging on a thorn. The badge is documented. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s record of a pair of stained-glass quarries describes a crowned, thorny sprig of hawthorn flanked by the initials H and E for Henry and his queen, Elizabeth of York, and says the same device appears in the stained glass of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. The Met introduces the crown story with “according to legend”. Tudor Times is more careful still: “It has long been said, and there is no evidence to refute it, that Richard’s crown was found in a thorn bush”, and “Certainly the emblem of a crown in a bush was used by Henry”. So the badge is a fact and the Bosworth origin is tradition. The Met adds that a later writer saw the symbolism in the thorns: the crown came with “thornes of heavie care”.
White, pink or red: does the colour change the meaning?
No source I read gives a different meaning by hawthorn colour. The RHS describes the common hawthorn’s flowers as creamy-white with pink anthers, the Woodland Trust says they are usually white and occasionally pink, and RTÉ says they are sometimes blushed with pink. The RHS lists the Midland hawthorn cultivar ‘Paul’s Scarlet’ with fully double, light red flowers, and no tradition in this guide attaches to it. Missouri’s hawthorns are all white: the Secretary of State says every variety in the state has white blossoms with five petals.
Which hawthorn is meant?
Hawthorn is a genus, not one plant, and the sorting is hard even for botanists. A 2025 study in AoB Plants says hybridization, polyploidization and apomixis “obscure genetic differentiation and boost morphological variability” in Crataegus. Apomictic plants reproduce asexually via seeds, giving clonal offspring. In Central Europe the common and Midland hawthorns are mostly diploid sexual species that hybridize to form Crataegus × media.
| Hawthorn | Where it grows | Why it matters to the meanings |
|---|---|---|
| Common hawthorn, C. monogyna | Native to Europe, northern Africa and western Asia (Oregon State University); native in the UK | The May tree of British and Irish folklore. Oregon lists it as a potential “B” noxious weed |
| Midland hawthorn, C. laevigata | The UK’s other native hawthorn; hybridizes with common hawthorn | Two stigmas and two seeds; Trees for Life suggests some indoors-taboo folklore began with it |
| ‘Paul’s Scarlet’, C. laevigata | Garden cultivar | Fully double, light red flowers (RHS) |
| ‘Biflora’, C. monogyna | Glastonbury, Somerset | Sometimes produces an early flush of white flowers (RHS); winter blossom per the Reading Herbarium; listed by the RHS as Glastonbury thorn |
| Downy hawthorn, C. mollis | Missouri | Approved as the state flower in 1923, according to the Missouri Department of Conservation |
Missouri’s state flower: the hawthorn
Missouri’s state flower is the hawthorn. Section 10.030 of the Missouri Revised Statutes reads: “The hawthorn, the blossom of the tree commonly called the ‘red haw’ or ‘wild haw’ and scientifically designated as crataegus, is declared to be the floral emblem of Missouri”. The law names the genus and no single species. The Missouri Secretary of State says Gov. Arthur M. Hyde signed the bill in 1923, and its history essay gives the date as 16 March 1923.
The path there was slow. The Secretary of State’s history of the floral emblem says a St. Louis newspaper poll for the 1893 Columbian Exposition was won by the crabapple blossom, with 9,582 votes cast, and that a 1921 hawthorn bill failed in the House 68 to 44 while a rival daisy bill never left committee. The hawthorn’s spokesperson called the daisy an “alien flower”. In 1923 the hawthorn bill passed the House 130 to 0 and the Senate 25 to 1.
Which hawthorn the state means is less settled. The Missouri Department of Conservation says downy hawthorn (Crataegus mollis) was approved as the state flower in 1923, and the Secretary of State’s history says the 1923-24 Official Manual of the State of Missouri was the first to identify the hawthorn, illustrated with C. mollis. The statute names only the genus. The agencies also count differently: the Secretary of State says approximately 75 separate species grow in the state, while the Department of Conservation says more than 75 kinds, counting species, subspecies and hybrids. Missouri is the one official hawthorn designation I found in the sources I checked.
Should you give or grow hawthorn?
As a gift, hawthorn is commonly listed as a secondary May birth flower, and our birth flowers by month guide sets it beside the other eleven pairs. Its partner, lily of the valley, has its own page: see lily of the valley meaning. For the wider picture of how floral meanings were built, our flower symbolism guide covers more than 100 blooms.
As a plant, the RHS lists the common hawthorn as a tree with a maximum height and spread of 4 to 8 metres, growing in full sun or partial shade on chalk, clay, loam or sand. Oregon State says it is hardy to USDA Zone 4 but can be invasive, and the Oregon Department of Agriculture lists it as a potential “B” noxious weed, so US growers should check local rules and consider a native kind. Our wildlife hedgerow guide is the closest thing we have to a hawthorn planting page: it covers hawthorn among native hedgerow species and lists US native options.
Frequently asked questions
What does hawthorn flower mean?
Hawthorn flower means hope in the Victorian language of flowers. Kate Greenaway’s Language of Flowers, Robert Tyas’s 1869 book and an 1884 New York dictionary all list the hawthorn as hope. Folklore adds May Day, fairy-tree and bad-luck meanings that rest on custom and belief.
Is hawthorn the May birth flower?
Hawthorn is commonly listed as the secondary May birth flower, with lily of the valley as the main one. Our May birth flowers guide covers both, and the birth flowers by month guide lists every month.
Why is hawthorn bad luck indoors?
Folklore held that hawthorn blossom brought illness or death into the house. The Woodland Trust and Trees for Life tie the belief to the smell of trimethylamine, a chemical also formed in decaying tissue, though RTÉ names a different amine, so the sources do not agree on the compound. No source I read cites a study that tests whether the smell caused the belief.
Is hawthorn Missouri’s state flower?
Yes. Section 10.030 of the Missouri Revised Statutes declares the hawthorn, scientifically designated Crataegus, the floral emblem of Missouri, and Gov. Arthur M. Hyde signed the bill on 16 March 1923. The statute names the genus, not a single species.
What is the Glastonbury Thorn?
The Glastonbury Thorn is both a legend and a tree. The tree is the cultivar Crataegus monogyna ‘Biflora’, which the RHS lists as Glastonbury thorn and says sometimes produces an early flush of smaller white flowers. Legend says it grew from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea, and the first mention of a flowering thorn at Glastonbury, according to the University of Reading’s archaeology project, comes in a text composed around 1520.
Was a road in Ireland really moved to avoid a fairy tree?
The documented case is a design change, not a reroute. In 1999 Clare County Council’s engineer told the Irish Times that the Latoon fairy bush could be worked around and kept in the bypass landscaping, after the folklorist Eddie Lenihan warned of misfortune if it was destroyed.
Sources
- Greenaway, Kate. Language of Flowers. Routledge. Project Gutenberg eBook 31591 (linked in text)
- Tyas, Robert. The Language of Flowers: or, Floral Emblems of Thoughts, Feelings, and Sentiments. George Routledge and Sons, London, 1869 (linked in text)
- The Language of Flowers, including Floral Poetry. R. Worthington, New York, 1884 (linked in text)
- Smithsonian Gardens. The Language of Flowers, historic bloom lesson plan (linked in text)
- Royal Horticultural Society. Crataegus monogyna (common hawthorn) plant profile (linked in text)
- Royal Horticultural Society. Crataegus monogyna ‘Biflora’ (Glastonbury thorn) plant profile (linked in text)
- Royal Horticultural Society. Crataegus laevigata ‘Paul’s Scarlet’ plant profile (linked in text)
- Woodland Trust. Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna) (linked in text)
- Woodland Trust Nature’s Calendar. Hawthorn: first flowering (linked in text)
- Trees for Life. Mythology and folklore of hawthorn (linked in text)
- McGarry, Marion. Death, sex, superstition and fear: the hawthorn tree in Ireland. RTÉ Brainstorm, 6 May 2020 (linked in text)
- Holmquist, Kathryn. Destruction of “fairy bush” causes concern. The Irish Times, 17 May 1999 (linked in text)
- Deegan, Gordon. Fairy bush survives the motorway planners. The Irish Times, 29 May 1999 (linked in text)
- Deegan, Gordon. Fairies defy chainsaw attacker to sprout new leaves on thorn bush. The Irish Times, 2 June 2003 (linked in text)
- Phrase Finder. Ne’er cast a clout till May be out: meaning and origin (linked in text)
- University of Reading. Joseph of Arimathea. Glastonbury Abbey Archaeology (linked in text)
- Andrews, Karen. #AdventBotany Day 4: The Glastonbury Thorn. University of Reading Herbarium (linked in text)
- Missouri Revisor of Statutes. RSMo Section 10.030, State floral emblem (linked in text)
- Missouri Secretary of State. State floral emblem: Hawthorn (Crataegus), archived copy of 6 January 2025 (linked in text)
- Woehlk, Erika. A History of Missouri’s Floral Emblem. Missouri Secretary of State, 15 October 2020, archived copy of 3 January 2025 (linked in text)
- Missouri Department of Conservation. Hawthorns, field guide (linked in text)
- Metropolitan Museum of Art. Quarry (one of a pair), hawthorn badge of Henry VII, archived copy of 7 February 2025 (linked in text)
- Tudor Times. 1485 Battle of Bosworth: the battle (linked in text)
- Ovid. Fasti, Book 6, translated by J. G. Frazer. Theoi Classical Texts Library (linked in text)
- El-Sayed, Ashraf M. The Pherobase: floral volatiles of Crataegus monogyna, archived copy of 8 February 2025 (linked in text)
- Oregon State University. Crataegus monogyna, Landscape Plants (linked in text)
- Píšová, Soňa, et al. Wide diversity in narrow geographic space: genetic, morphological and ploidy variation in three Central European Crataegus species with emphasis on their reproductive modes. AoB Plants 18(1): plaf067, 2025 (linked in text)
