Black Hawthorn Crataegus douglasii
Black Hawthorn is a perennial tree native to Alaska, Canada, and the lower 48 states. It grows to 15 ft and blooms Apr in full sun – part shade, with black fruit. A keystone plant for native insects and the food web.
More about this plant
Crataegus douglasii is a North American species of hawthorn known by the common names black hawthorn and Douglas' thornapple. It is most abundant in the Pacific Northwest. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun – part shade
- Soil & moisture
- High moisture
- Soil pH
- 4.8–7.5
- Fertility need
- Low
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 3+
- Height
- 15 ft
- Spacing
- 7–15 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- Moderate
- Growth rate
- Moderate
- Growth form
- Thicket-forming
- Lifespan
- Perennial · moderate
- Foliage
- Deciduous broadleaf · medium texture
- Active growth
- Spring through autumn
- Fruit
- Black persists into winter
- Propagate by
- Seed, Cuttings, Bare root, Container
- Seed starting
- Needs cold stratification a cold-moist spell before it germinates
- Seeds ripen
- Spring – Autumn seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Deer browsing
- High browsed readily
- Resprouts if cut
- Yes regrows after top-kill
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~168 caterpillar species
Crataegus supports ~168 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is an exceptional genus.
Recorded feeding on Crataegus in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees 3 bee visitors
3 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Black Hawthorn :
Wildlife & visitors 4 birds
Open records of who else uses Black Hawthorn — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 4 birds species (fruit, seed, browse):
How we know this (2) Methods & honest limits
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
Sources for this entry (36) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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