Tag Archives: blackthorn

Blackthorn in bloom

11 Sunday Jan 2026

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This winter season continues to provide phenological surprises. I saw my first Blackthorn blossom on Christmas Eve, during a quick visit to Cosmeston Lakes Country Park to provide an early Christmas dinner of berry-flavoured suet pellets to my crow friends.

And then, during yesterday’s walk, which took me through fields perhaps half a mile north of the country park, I found another Blackthorn tree with blossom open on a couple of its branches – this despite several very cold days and a bit of blasting from (though we missed the worst of) Storm Goretti.

Leafmines: Lyonetia prunifoliella, 2

30 Monday Sep 2024

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As you will have gathered from the ‘2’ in the title, I’ve blogged about this leafmine before (Leafmines: Lyonetia prunifoliella, 9 October 2023).

240930 lyonetia prunifoliella (1)

The reason I’m revisiting this species is that, by sheer chance, I turned over a couple of Blackthorn leaves at Cosmeston Lakes Country Park last week and discovered an adult moth sitting next to the ‘hammock’ cocoon from which it had, presumably, very recently emerged.

240930 lyonetia prunifoliella (2)

My photos aren’t sharp as the Blackthorn was growing just inside the edge of a woodland and the light wasn’t good but I was still delighted to find this gorgeous little moth.

240930 lyonetia prunifoliella (3)

First Blackthorn blossom

12 Monday Feb 2024

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Wouldn’t you know it? After finishing yesterday’s post about wildflowers and trees currently in bloom, I went for a walk and found several Blackthorn / Sloe bushes / trees in flower. They’ve probably been flowering for a week or more but I hadn’t walked the path they were growing along – a reminder to keep mixing up my walking routes. What blossom have you seen in your area?

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The Blackthorn is buzzing

23 Friday Apr 2021

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Flies and hoverflies, bumbles, bees and butterflies – all love feasting on Blackthorn blossom as much as I love watching them enjoying its bounty. And the blossom itself is so blindingly white it’s like a springtime snowfall when the petals fall to the ground.

Phellinus pomaceus

12 Friday Mar 2021

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Though I haven’t been able to verify its identification, I’m fairly sure today’s fungus is Phellinus pomaceus.

210312 Phellinus pomaceus (1)

It’s a hard, woody bracket fungus that grows on Prunus tree species – in this case, it’s growing on Blackthorn (Prunus spinosa).

The NBN (National Biodiversity Network Trust) Atlas entry for this species (which also includes a map showing where in Britain the fungus has been recorded) says ‘It is not aggressively pathogenic but can cause considerable decay in trees suffering from other stress factors’, so you wouldn’t want to find it in a commercial fruit orchard. In my case, the fungi were only showing on two adjacent trees in a large copse of Blackthorn, and the trees looked quite elderly, so I don’t think it’s causing a problem.

28/366 Blossoming Blackthorn

28 Tuesday Jan 2020

Posted by in flowers, nature, winter

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Despite being caught twice in freezing hail showers, I had a lovely walk today, and part of the reason is because I saw my first Blackthorn blossoms for 2020. As Blackthorn flowers appear before the leaves (in contrast to Hawthorn, where the leaves appear first), this hedge along the roadside at Cosmeston Lakes Country Park still looks lifeless and barren.

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In fact, the brown branches and twigs were dotted here and there with white buds and occasional fully open blossoms. Spring is coming!

Cherry plum or Blackthorn?

10 Tuesday Apr 2018

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Being a relative newbie to Britain, I’m still very much a learner when it comes to identifying plants (and everything else, to be honest), so I was pleased recently to learn how to tell Cherry plum blossom from Blackthorn.

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

It’s partly in the timing – Cherry plum (Prunus cerasifera) usually flowers first, apparently – and also in the growth pattern, but a sure-fire way to tell whether the gorgeous blossom you’re puzzling over is this or Blackthorn (Prunus spinosa), which flowers soon afterwards, is to look at the back of the flower.

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

In the Blackthorn the sepals (those leaf-like bits that originally enclose the flower but split apart when the flower opens) lay flat along the backs of the flower petals, or between them when fully open (photos above), whereas in the Cherry plum, the sepals are folded back (photos below).

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Wild words: primaveral

14 Wednesday Feb 2018

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Primaveral: adjective, meaning of, relating to, or taking place in early spring (as in, for example, the primaveral blossoming of the Cherry plum tree in my photo).
According to the Oxford Dictionary, the word appeared in the English language in the early 19th century, having come possibly from the Catalan primavera, the Spanish primavera, the Portuguese primavera, or the Italian primavera, which all mean ‘springtime’. And those words probably came from the Latin prīmum vēr, meaning first or earliest spring.

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