THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
November 28.] 
arc the most expert gardeners for improving flowers, 
although we have not got the nack of raising better fruits 
than our neighbours. 
C. orientdlis (The Eastern Thorn).—There are half 
a dozen thorns which I call my own favourite trees, 
and I think this must come in as the next best after the 
scarlet flewering ones. The flowers of this are nothing 
better, if so good, as those of our “ Maybut the 
great beauty of the tree is in the autumn, when it is 
loaded with the haws, which are large, of a dark pur¬ 
plish red, or port wine colour—and not amiss for eating. 
They call it, also, sanguinea, or Blood-red-fruited Thorn, 
and some other names besides, for many of these thorns 
are loaded with synonymes; many of them, and this 
orientalis, among the rest, were called Mespilus, or 
Medlars, in olden times. Tourneforte found it first, in 
1700, when on his travels in the Levant, growing in the 
Crimea and the northern borders of the Black Sea, and 
he named it Mespilus orientalis. It does not accord with 
“the May” in the south-east of Europe, as it does not 
bloom till the very end of May in this country. 
C. Aronia (The Aronian Thorn.)—This is the next best 
thorn, which has less thorns on it than the generality of 
them, and chiefly valued for the abundance of its yellow 
fruit in the autumn, which are good to eat, and last in 
use from September till they drop off about the end of 
this month. It makes a very handsome middle-sized 
tree, with fine leaves variously cut, or lobed, like most 
of the thorns. There are no plants more difficult to 
understand from pen descriptions of the leaves than the 
different kinds of thorns with jagged leaves, as a great 
deal depends on the kind of soil they are growing in; and 
sometimes you might pick half a dozen forms of leaf off 
the same tree. The Aronia is a native of the south-east 
of Europe,—from Greece, eastward. 
G. tanacetifolia (The Tansy-leaved Thorn).—If this 
thorn would bear as many fruit at one crop as Acouia, 
most people would think it the handsomest of them all. 
The jagged large leaves are of themselves very hand¬ 
some, and the yellow fruit on good land attains the 
largest size of all the haws. It is a strong upright 
growing tree, and without “stopping” the branches are 
too apt to grow wide apart when the tree is young and 
vigorous, and without pruning at an early age I have 
seen very gawky specimens of it. Every young tree 
within or about the garden, however, gets a yearly 
pruning now-a-days, but summer stopping is the best 
way to bring any of these thorns to a well balanced 
head. When a young shoot is seen to push much 
stronger than the others, it should at once be stopped ; 
and, as often happens, when such stopped shoots break 
out into more lateral spray than is convenient to keep 
without crowding the head of a tree, the right way is to 
cut off the superfluous parts close to where they started 
at the winter pruning, so that no more growth can be 
made there. Inexperienced persons are very apt to 
make a wrong step with this kind of pruning in any 
plant they take in hand ; they think that where a set of 
branches are too close to each other, the remedy is to cut 
in so many of them to a few joints, but if the plant is 
vigorous, this kind of spur-pruning only aggravates the 
evil ten-fold—a host of fresh shoots issue from the spurs 
the following season. In all cases, therefore, where 
crowded shoo.ts are to be dealt with, the proper way is to 
cut the over-stock of them clean off from the parent 
branch, and if this is done before the growth is more than 
a year old, no more shoots will ever come from the same 
part of the branch. Thus stopped and pruned at the 
first setting oft’, the Tansy-leaved Thorn will soon form 
a head as handsome and well balanced as any of its 
fellows. It is a native of all the higher mountains of 
Greece, and was described by Dioscorides in his “ Me¬ 
dical Botany," by the name of Mespilon, our Mespilus, 
as being “a spinous tree, with leaves like hawthorn, 
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fruit like a little apple, sweet, with three hard seeds.” 
They say of this great herbalist, that be was not over 
particular about how he described his plants; but he 
made a good hit of his “ Mespilon,” no doubt from his 
having partook of the “ little apples,” on their native 
hills; only we in this country often find five instead of 
“ three hard seeds.” 
G. odoratissimn. —Perhaps this is the next best thorn, 
but at this stage there are seven or eight kinds which 
are equally good, and therefore it must be left as an open 
question for the present. At a short distance, when 
this one is not in flower or fruit, it might be mistaken 
for the last, but a practised eye would see their diflerence 
in the middle of winter: this one having the branches 
spreading out laterally, while the last has them quite 
upright and less downy. The leaves of both are greyish, 
with a woolly down. The fruit of this is large, dull red 
or brick colour, and freely produced. The name is the 
worst thing about it: odoratissima means the sweetest, 
and that is a botanical fib, not one of them being sweeter 
or even so sweet as our own “ May.” It is a native of 
the Crimea and parts bordering on the Black Sea. 
G. Azarolus (The Azarole Thorn) is another of the 
downy-leaved ones, with large red mealy fruit, which is 
eaten in the south of Europe, but with us is too sharp 
or acid to be indulged in. It makes a handsome middle- 
sized tree. A native of Italy and the south of France. 
G. coccinea is a most handsome tree, with an in¬ 
different name, which is just as likely to lead people into 
error as not: coccinea refers to the scarlet fruit, which 
is not more scarlet than the other bright red-fruited 
kinds; but the beauty of this does not depend so much 
on the fruit as on the fine leaves, and low spreading 
character of the branches, and the light colour of the old 
bark, which, like that of the birch, is very conspicuous in 
winter. I never heard of it being recommended for a 
stock to work the smaller sorts on, but I am quite sure 
it would make the best stock of any of them for that 
purpose. There are scores of this coccinea here about 
the Park, the soil of which is light, and in many parts 
only a few inches above the chalk; yet I never saw 
thorns in general do so well anywhere as they do here. 
I am within the mark in saying there are five hundred 
handsome full-grown specimens of them within the deer 
fence ; and many of them could not be trained by hand 
into better shaped heads above the browsing line. And 
as to bush thorns, there are a thousand of them, if there 
is one; and when they are in flower the air is loaded 
with their fragrance, and you might look in the morning 
out of a bed-room window on a grove of them, and think 
there had been a fall of snow the night before. Now, 
amongst all these thorns, this coccinea is as healthy as 
any of them, and at thirty years old is but a very small 
stemmed tree'; and if it should ever become fashionable to 
have little standard thorns, like standard roses, this should 
be used as a stock. If the country was searched for 
curious little thorns, they might be found no doubt of 
such a size as would never grow bigger than a Brennus 
standard rose. I mean those of—I hardly know how to 
call them—deranged growth, which country people call 
“ birds’ nests.” A vigorous shoot is arrested suddenly in 
its growth, turns gouty at the end, and makes a bundle of 
little shoots, these little shoots never extend more than 
an inch or so in a season, and look at a distance as if a 
mistletoe bush was growing in the tree. Now, by taking 
buds from shoots in this state, you would only perpetuate 
the deranged condition, and transfer it to a new parent, 
and that parent should be coccinea, or a variety of it called 
coralina; and there is another variety of coccinea called 
maxima, which they say is the best sort of the three for 
a garden plant, but I never saw a full-grown plant of it 
myself. 
G. pyrifolia (The Pear-leaved Thorn) is also a large- 
leaved sort, with close-growing branches, and small 
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