Crataegus opaca

This is a tree you harvest from a boat. Crataegus opaca, the western mayhaw, grows wild in the flooded bottoms of the Gulf Coastal Plain, the cypress sloughs and pond margins of east Texas, Louisiana, and the Deep South, and when their fruit ripens in late spring it drops straight into the water and floats. For generations Southern families went out in May with boats, nets, and scoops to gather the bobbing red haws off the surface, a fast three weeks of work that turned into a year's worth of jelly. The name says as much: mayhaw, for the month, and haw, the old word for hawthorn.

The jelly is the whole point, and it is genuinely famous. The fruit is a small coral pome, tart and loaded with pectin, kin to the apple and the rose, setting into a clear, bright, half-wild preserve that whole towns organize around. Colquitt, Georgia simply calls itself the Mayhaw Capital of the World and throws a festival every April; Louisiana made the tree its official state fruit.

Before any of that, in early spring, they smother their bare gray branches in clouds of white hawthorn bloom, early and generous, a gift to the first pollinators of the year. They were born in standing water but do not insist on it, and will settle happily into an ordinary garden given steady moisture. Plant one for the blossom, the birds, and the biscuits to come.