Viburnum prunifolium - Black Haw

Scientific Name:

Viburnum prunifolium

Common Name: Black Haw

Thomas Jefferson's idea for a shrubbery at Monticello in 1771 included the planting of "Haw" among other species "not exceeding 10 feet."^[1] It was offered in Philadelphia by the Bartrams in their nursery listing of 1793 along with several other viburnum species. It must have been a long standing item, for Peter Collinson wrote to John Bartram in 1739 thanking him for the black haw he sent the previous year.^[2]

This shrub or small tree is native to Michigan and Connecticut south to Texas and Florida, and it bears creamy white, flattened clusters of flowers followed by pink-rose, edible fruit that ripens to bluish black. Its foliage turns purple to reddish in autumn.

- Peggy Cornett, n.d.

Primary Source References

1786 February 5. (Jefferson to Antonio Giannini). "A list of seeds which Anthony Giannini is desired to send me ... Haw tree, both black and red ...."^[3]

Further Sources

Viburnum prunifolium in the Monticello Garden Explorer
Coats, Alice M. Garden Shrubs and Their Histories. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.
McMahon, Bernard. The American Gardener's Calendar. Philadelphia: B. Graves, 1806. See page 259 for a discussion of black haw.
Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants.

References

^ Garden Book, 1766-1824, page 7, by Thomas Jefferson [electronic edition], Thomas Jefferson Papers: An Electronic Archive (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2003). See also Betts, Garden Book, 27.
^ Joan Parry Dutton, Plants of Colonial Williamsburg (Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg, 1979), 78; Ann Leighton, American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 485.
^ PTJ, 9:254. Transcription available at Founders Online.

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