The Cockspur Hawthorn of Cylburn Arboretum

Cylburn Arboretum's cockspur hawthorn carries thorns long enough that a Baltimore Sun guest columnist compared them to a giant's toothpick, straight, sharp and several inches each, the kind farmers once grew into living fences because nothing could push through them. This one grows loose rather than clipped, somewhere in the arboretum's 207 acres on Baltimore's northwest side. The same columnist, touring the grounds in late 2023, called it Cylburn's only remaining state champion, the last of a run of record trees the arboretum used to hold more of. That claim sits next to a complication: the arboretum's own printed trail map names a different tree, a castor aralia, as the state champion instead. Titles like this move when a tree grows, dies or gets remeasured, and a printed map does not always catch up. Either the aralia has since lost the title or the map is simply the older document. What the newspaper account gives that the map cannot is a direct look, taken in November: bare branches carrying a heavy load of small red haws, and those thorns. Nobody has measured its girth or dated it, and this pass could not pin which part of the grounds it stands on. If you find it, the thorns and the fruit are how you will know.