Should the Hawthorn Be Saved?
Updated at 1:05 p.m. on June 4, 2024
The last time Ron Lance had visited Doggett Gap in western North Carolina, he photographed one of the premier sites for hawthorn trees in the American Southeast. Thousands of white blossoms speckled the hillside, with North Carolina’s Newfound Mountains stretching to the horizon. Last summer, he visited again for the first time in 25 years. All that was left was a field of fescue grass. Only a couple dozen hawthorns remained.
Lance is a caretaker of a nature preserve in North Carolina and an expert on hawthorn trees. (The species is named after him.) And for years now, he’s been chronicling their mysterious decline in the eastern half of the United States. A century ago, the trees were all over the eastern landscape. Now finding one anywhere is hard. One Missouri botanist, Justin Thomas, told me they were functionally extinct
