Black Haw
From Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia
Common Name: Black Haw[1]
Scientific Name: Viburnum prunifolium
Thomas Jefferson’s idea for a shrubbery at Monticello in 1771 included the planting of “Haw” among other species "not exceeding 10 feet."[2] It was offered in Philadelphia by the Bartrams in their nursery listing of 1793 along with several other viburnum species. It must have been a long standing item, for Peter Collinson writes to John Bartram in 1739 thanking him for the black haw he sent the previous year.[3]
This shrub or small tree is native to Michigan and Connecticut south to Texas and Florida, and it bears creamy white, flattened clusters of flowers followed by pink-rose, edible fruit that ripens to bluish black. Its foliage turns purple to reddish in autumn.
Primary Source References[4]
1786 February 5. (Jefferson to Antonio Giannini). "A list of seeds which Anthony Giannini is desired to send me...Haw tree, both black and red..."[5]
Footnotes
- ↑ This section is based on a Center for Historic Plants Information Sheet.
- ↑ Betts, Garden Book, 27. Manuscript and transcription at the Massachusetts Historical Society.
- ↑ Joan Parry Dutton, Plants of Colonial Williamsburg (Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg, 1979), 78, and Ann Leighton, American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 485.
- ↑ Please note that this list should not be considered comprehensive.
- ↑ PTJ, 9:254.
Further Sources
- Coates, Alice M. Garden Shrubs and their Histories. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992
- McMahon, Bernard. The American Gardener’s Calendar, 1806 (Charlottesville: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 1997), 295
- Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants
