Crataegus azarolusL.

AzaroleCrete HawthornMediterranean HawthornMediterranian MedlerMosfiliaOriental Hawthornazarole

WFO wfo-0000988173 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Crataegus azarolus, photographed by Dyhia YOUSFI
fig. a Dyhia YOUSFI, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-10-14 / obs. 167483151

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium
Smithsonian, US National Herbarium
Accession
US 462132
Filed as
Crataegus azarolus L.
Det. by
Phipps, James B., (UWO), University of Western Ontario
Collected
C. G. Pringle 1905-10-05
Origin
MX
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC0 1.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 22 botanical countries

Regions where Crataegus azarolus is native: Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Cyprus, East Aegean Is., Iran, Iraq, Lebanon-Syria, Palestine, Sinai, Transcaucasus, Türkiye, Turkmenistan, Baleares, France, Greece, Italy, Kriti, Sardegna, Sicilia, Türkiye-in-Europe AlgeriaEgyptLibyaTunisiaCyprusEast Aegean Is.IranIraqLebanon-SyriaPalestineSinaiTranscaucasusTürkiyeTurkmenistanFranceGreeceItalyKritiSiciliaTürkiye-in-Europe BalearesSardegna
Native distribution of Crataegus azarolus, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows. Regions too small to draw at this scale are marked with a dot.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Cyprus CYP ASIA-TEMPERATE
East Aegean Is. EAI
Iran IRN
Iraq IRQ
Lebanon-Syria LBS
Palestine PAL
Sinai SIN
Transcaucasus TCS
Türkiye TUR
Turkmenistan TKM
Baleares BAL EUROPE
France FRA
Greece GRC
Italy ITA
Kriti KRI
Sardegna SAR
Sicilia SIC
Türkiye-in-Europe TUE
Algeria ALG AFRICA
Egypt EGY
Libya LBY
Tunisia TUN

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 30 in flower of 157 examined

Proportion of examined Crataegus azarolus in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 4 too few examined
Feb 1 10 10% 2% to 40%
Mar 5 15 33% 15% to 58%
Apr 16 20 80% 58% to 92%
May 7 14 50% 27% to 73%
Jun 1 2 too few examined
Jul 0 5 0% 0% to 43%
Aug 0 10 0% 0% to 28%
Sep 0 24 0% 0% to 14%
Oct 0 34 0% 0% to 10%
Nov 0 13 0% 0% to 23%
Dec 0 6 0% 0% to 39%

Peak flowering in Apr. Each bar is the share of Crataegus azarolus observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 30 of 157 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 2 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 257 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -4.9 °C 4.1 °C 11.3 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 25.9 °C 29.9 °C 36.3 °C
Annual rainfall 440 mm 754 mm 1,186 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 2 mm 15 mm 99 mm

It is found where winters bring light frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 257 research-grade observations of Crataegus azarolus that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 49 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

  • Azarolus crataegoides Borkh.
  • Azarolus crataegoides var. dulcis (Risso) M.Roem.
  • Azarolus crataegoides var. florifera (Risso) M.Roem.
  • Azarolus crataegoides var. intermedia (Risso) M.Roem.
  • Azarolus crataegoides var. macrocarpa (Risso) M.Roem.
  • Azarolus crataegoides var. malus (Risso) M.Roem.
  • Azarolus crataegoides var. piriformis (Risso) M.Roem.
  • Azarolus crataegoides var. torulosa (Risso) M.Roem.
  • Azarolus maroccana M.Roem.
  • Crataegus aronia (L.) Bosc
  • Crataegus aronia (L.) Bosc ex DC.
  • Crataegus aronia var. dentata Browicz
  • Crataegus aronia var. minuta Browicz
  • Crataegus assadii Khat.
  • Crataegus azarolus subsp. aronia (L.) Rouy & E.G.Camus
  • Crataegus azarolus unranked typica Regel
  • Crataegus azarolus var. assadii (Khat.) K.I.Chr.
  • Crataegus azarolus var. chrysoclada (Gand.) Hayek
  • Crataegus azarolus var. dentata (Browicz) Dönmez
  • Crataegus azarolus var. dulcis Risso
  • Crataegus azarolus var. florifera Risso
  • Crataegus azarolus var. hastata Diap.
  • Crataegus azarolus var. intermedia Risso
  • Crataegus azarolus var. kurdistanica Diap.

and 25 more.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.