Crataegus pruinosa (waxyfruit hawthorn)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 5 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 5 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Crataegus pruinosa, photographed by Henggang Cui — fig. a Henggang Cui, CC0 1.0 / 2021-05-08 / obs. 127565587

Crataegus pruinosa, photographed by Summit Metro Parks — fig. b Summit Metro Parks, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 124814794

Crataegus pruinosa, photographed by evangrimes — fig. d evangrimes, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 198673769

Crataegus pruinosa, photographed by Alan Weakley — fig. e Alan Weakley, CC0 1.0 / obs. 7167611

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.

Native range 30 botanical countries

Native distribution of Crataegus pruinosa, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Alabama	ALA	NORTHERN AMERICA
Arkansas	ARK
Connecticut	CNT
Georgia	GEO
Illinois	ILL
Indiana	INI
Iowa	IOW
Kansas	KAN
Kentucky	KTY
Louisiana	LOU
Maine	MAI
Maryland	MRY
Massachusetts	MAS
Michigan	MIC
Mississippi	MSI
Missouri	MSO
Montana	MNT
New Hampshire	NWH
New Jersey	NWJ
New York	NWY
North Carolina	NCA
Ohio	OHI
Ontario	ONT
Pennsylvania	PEN
Québec	QUE
Tennessee	TEN
Vermont	VER
Virginia	VRG
West Virginia	WVA
Wisconsin	WIS

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 72 in flower of 136 examined

56%

80%

Proportion of examined Crataegus pruinosa in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	1	too few examined
Feb	0	0	too few examined
Mar	0	0	too few examined
Apr	24	43	56%	41% to 70%
May	48	60	80%	68% to 88%
Jun	0	11	0%	0% to 26%
Jul	0	6	0%	0% to 39%
Aug	0	6	0%	0% to 39%
Sep	0	5	0%	0% to 43%
Oct	0	3	too few examined
Nov	0	1	too few examined
Dec	0	0	too few examined

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Crataegus pruinosa 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. 72 of 136 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 6 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 119 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-8.6 °C	-5.6 °C	1.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	25.2 °C	27.6 °C	32.5 °C
Annual rainfall	955 mm	1,064 mm	1,488 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	187 mm	223 mm	311 mm

It is found where winters bring hard 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 119 research-grade observations of Crataegus pruinosa 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 80 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.

Crataegus amoena Sarg.
Crataegus angulata Sarg.
Crataegus arcana Beadle
Crataegus aspera Sarg.
Crataegus asperata Sarg.
Crataegus ater Ashe
Crataegus bellula Sarg.
Crataegus brachypoda Sarg.
Crataegus bracteata Sarg.
Crataegus caerulescens Sarg.
Crataegus cicur Ashe
Crataegus coccinea var. pruinosa (H.L.Wendl.) Dippel
Crataegus congesta Sarg.
Crataegus conjuncta Sarg.
Crataegus crawfordiana Sarg.
Crataegus deducta Sarg.
Crataegus deltoides Ashe
Crataegus disjuncta Sarg.
Crataegus disjuncta var. magnifolia (Sarg.) E.J.Palmer
Crataegus dissona Sarg.
Crataegus dissona var. bellula (Sarg.) Kruschke
Crataegus durobrivensis Sarg.
Crataegus formosa Sarg.
Crataegus franklinensis Sarg.

and 56 more.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
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.