By Thomas Bruges Flower, Esq. 



65 



five or six to ten or twenty feet high. Branches smooth, thorny ; 

 thorns, lateral awl-shaped, sharp. Leaves alternate, stalked, deep 

 green, glossy, tapering at the base, and more or less divided 

 upwards into three or five lobes or segments, which are irregularly 

 toothed or even lobed. The flowers are sweet scented, and are 

 produced in terminal corymbs ; they are generally white, but 

 sometimes they are pink or almost scarlet. In clayey soils the 

 petals present various shades of pink and red, and the "Red May" 

 of our pleasure gardens is derived from some of these originally 

 wild varieties. The anthers are pink, changing to black. The 

 styles vary in number from one to two, and sometimes three in 

 different flowers of the same ^bunch. The fruit is mealy, insipid, 

 and mostly of a dark red colour when ripe ; its cells, as many as the 

 styles, furrowed externally and very hard. There are several 

 varieties of this plant cultivated in Wiltshire, as the large scarlet 

 Hawthorn, the yellow-berried Hawthorn, the maple-leaved and 

 the double blossomed, but perhaps the most remarkable is the 

 "Glastonbury Thorn" (Or. ox. precox,) which comes into leaf and 

 flowers about Christmas. 1 The other varieties are grown more 



1 Tradition informs us that when St. Joseph of Arirnathea, with his companions, 

 proceeded from Palestine, they passed up the Great Western Channel of Britain, 

 and landed on the Island of Avalon, so named by the Romans — "Insula 

 Avalonica," being surrounded by water from the Western Channel. The place 

 where St. Joseph landed is recorded and known by the existing remains of an 

 embankment, denominated in the ancient maps of Avalon, the Sea-wall. It is 

 situated on the northern side of a hill formerly called Worral Hill, or Weary- 

 all Hill, at the present time a park, now or lately belonging to William Strode, 

 Esq. ; and on the western eminence of this mount was erected the lirst Christian 

 Standard in Britain, the exact spot having been commemorated at a very early 

 period by the planting of a Hawthorn -tree brought from a southern climate, 

 which put forth its flowers about the advent of the Christmas Festival, that 

 being in fact the period at which it blossoms in its native country of Palestine. 

 An ignorant and credulous age did not lose sight of so extraordinary a pheno- 

 menon, and accordingly it was speedily invested with the obscurity of a super- 

 stitious legend. The tree was cut down in the reign of Charles the First by a Pro- 

 testant soldier, it being regarded as a relic of superstition; the stump, or root, 

 remained visible so late as the year 1750, the spot where it grew being marked 

 by a stone fixed in the ground, bearing this inscription : I. A. A. D. XXXI. Several 

 trees have since been propagated by means of grafts from the original ; the oldest 

 at present existing, and taken from Worral Hill, stands near St. John's Church 

 at Glastonbury, and was planted about the year 1600 ; others are preserved in 

 VOL. IX. NO. XXV. F 



