The Kansas Hawthorn of the Lily Pool

The largest Kansas hawthorn in the United States grows in Brooklyn, and the species normally gives up at around twenty feet. This one reached 35, on a 20 inch trunk under a 28 foot crown, and in 1985 the American Forestry Association named it a national champion. New York State has carried it on its Big Tree Register since 2009 as one of only two champion trees in the five boroughs. None of that was the plan. Rochester's parks department sent it down as a gift in 1912, and it was planted across from the Lily Pool at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which had opened to the public only a year or so before. It has stood there through everything the garden has become since. Crataegus coccinioides is a hawthorn of the American Midwest, a thorny, unfashionable small tree that most visitors walk past for eleven months of the year. October is the exception, when the leaves go scarlet and orange and the branches hang with dark crimson haws. Entry to the Garden is paid. The pin here sits at the Washington Avenue gate rather than at the tree, because no survey has recorded its coordinates: walk to the Lily Pool by the conservatory and look for the small tree carrying an unreasonable amount of fruit.