HERBAL MEDICINE: Hawthorn - your friend from the hedge

Hawthorn - your friend from the hedge


The benefits of hawthorn as a herbal medicine are significant

Herbal Medicine
Sabine Hiller

THE hawthorn tree is surely familiar to us all, with its great show of white blossoms in May and its abundance of red berries in the autumn. It fulfils a useful role as a hedgerow plant, providing food and shelter for numerous insects, birds and mammals, and with its spiky stems it keeps the livestock where it’s meant to be – within the field and off the road! But it also has important medicinal uses and is part of every medical herbalist’s dispensary.
The name hawthorn is derived from the Old English ‘hagathorn’, literally meaning ‘hedgethorn’. Hundreds of hawthorn species have been identified so far, but the type most commonly found around this part of the world is Crataegus monogyna. If you want to get a good crop of flowers and berries from your hawthorn hedgerow, don’t cut it too often – a 50 fold difference in berry yields between annually cut and uncut hedges has been reported.
Hawthorn was first mentioned as a medicine in ninth century medical texts and continued to be used throughout the middle ages. In the 19th century an Irish doctor called Dr Green was recorded as having used a ‘secret’ remedy for treating cardiovascular disease very successfully. After his death in 1864 his daughter revealed his famous cure to be a tincture made from ripe hawthorn berries!
Medical research over the last 50 years and more has examined the potential of hawthorn to treat cardiovascular conditions, and has come up with a lot of interesting information, including its validation as a treatment for mild to moderate heart failure.
Most of the more recent pharmacological research on hawthorn fruit, leaves and flowers has focussed on a group of plant constituents called flavonoids and more specifically on OPCs (short for oligomeric proanthocyanidins – in case you wanted to know!).
Flavonoids have been shown to be anti-oxidants, to improve blood supply to the heart muscle, to regulate the heart rate and to help improve the blood lipid profile. Hawthorn contains a lot of flavonoids and in particular OPCs, which are especially powerful antioxidants and also cause vasorelaxation.
This means they help blood vessels to relax and thereby dilate, which is an important strategy for reducing blood pressure. Some researchers tried to isolate some of those compounds, but found that compound mixtures of constituents as found in the plant extracts tended to have stronger effects than individual constituents on their own.
Hawthorn extracts have been shown in several clinical trials to increase exercise tolerance and control symptoms in patients with heart failure. Preliminary studies have indicated that hawthorn may also be useful in the treatment of anxiety disorder. As a bonus, hawthorn is generally extremely well tolerated – in one clinical study there were more adverse effects in the placebo group than the hawthorn group! However, care has to be taken when combining hawthorn with heart medication, as there may be additive effects and in patients with low blood pressure.
While medical herbalists usually prescribe hawthorn in the form of concentrated alcoholic extracts, ripe haws also work well for making chutneys and flavoured vinegars (just steep the crushed fruit in vinegar). In the 18th century ripe haws were sold in Dublin and eaten by the poor – when ground into a flour and then baked, haws produced a substitute bread. Here is a recipe for a dipping sauce that goes well with spring rolls, hard-boiled eggs, grilled tofu or meat.

> Sabine Hiller BSc(Hons) MIIMH MNIMH – is a qualified professional medical herbalist based in Westport. She is a member of the Irish Institute of Medical Herbalists and the National Institute of Medical Herbalists (UK). She can be contacted at 098 35909.