I THINK I'LL JUST NOD, WAVE AND WALK ON

43 DEGREES, AND A COLD, PELTING RAIN

FRUIT LADEN HAWTHORNS...

THEY'RE NOT COCKSPUR OR WASHINGTON HAWTHORNS, MAYBE THEY'RE ...???

Wednesday, 8:30 AM.  49 degrees F on the ferry dock, 43 on the back porch.  Wind N, with strong gusts driving a cold, pelting rain.  There is 1.25" of rain in the gage.  The sky has a low overcast, the humidity is 85% and the barometer is steady, at 29.86".  It feels like late fall; summer, where were you?
   Have you ever been in a big-box store and bumped into someone you are used to seeing somewhere else, like walking your dog in the neighborhood, and don't recognize them because they are out of context?  Embarrassing, isn't it?  It happens to me all the time, and not only with people,  but with plants.
   The last several winters I have spotted a large population of small trees or large shrubs heavily laden with red fruit on a hill at the juncture of Star Route and Echo Valley Road, west of Bayfield out in the boondocks.  I thought they looked like winterberry, but it was not the right habitat and  the snow was always too deep to get close to them, so the other day I decide to take a look at them.  Sure enough, there they were, loaded again with red fruit.  But they couldn't be winterberry because the soil proved to be a dry, rocky sand and winterberry require wet feet.  And they weren't highbush cranberry, either.
   They were, at closer examination, hawthorns.  Of course, I should have recognized them, but I seldom see them in such great concentrations and they just didn't ring a bell.
   O.K., so I remembered my neighborhood dog-walker's last name. But then I didn't know his first name.  And that is the way it is with the hawthorns on the hill; I know the genus name, Crataegus, but it is not a hawthorn species that I recognize.  They are not cockspur or Washington thorn or any other thornapple species that I would recognize as landscape trees.  The Crataegus genus is very confusing and it would take me countless hours to even get close to identifying the species.  Maybe its hopelessly hybridized, or maybe its some sort of a disjunct from somewhere else.  There are dozens of confusing species that it may or may not be.
    I think I'll just nod, wave and walk on.