The Eliot Hawthorns

Four trees, four separate heritage numbers. Portland registered these hawthorns individually as Heritage Trees #109 through #112, which is a lot of paperwork for a row most people walk past as a single hedge. They stand in the planting strip along SW 12th Ave in front of the First Unitarian Church, all four planted in 1966 and all four added to the register in 1996. Lavalle hawthorns are small trees and these are no exception: 11 to 13.4 metres tall, with trunks between 1.8 and 2.26 metres around. They are also, by a wide margin, the youngest entries in this city. They earn their place through the congregation rather than through age. Rev. Thomas Lamb Eliot led this church from 1867 to 1893 and became one of Portland's more consequential citizens, founding social and library associations and lending his name to the Eliot Glacier on Mount Hood. The members he drew in did a good deal of the civic building of early Portland, and the row went in as a tribute to that. Come in autumn and all four hang with dense clusters of dark red haws while the leaves go bronze. That is the point in the year when the row stops reading as a hedge and starts reading as four trees.