Hawthorn: introduction
From the Greek kràtaigos, "strength and robustness", hawthorn is known in botany as Crataegus monogyna, referring to its hard and solid wood, still used as a good fuel.
Hawthorn is widely used in phytotherapy for its phytocomplex, but it is also used as an ornamental plant for its beautiful flowers. In the past, hawthorn was also cultivated to create impenetrable barriers thanks to its pointed thorns; still, its fruits are used for food purposes, both for the preparation of syrups and jellies, and for the production of flour, suitable for a particular type of bread.
Botanical description
Just like Rosa canina and Potentilla, also Crataegus monogyna (also called Crataegus oxyacantha ) belongs to the Rosaceae family: the hawthorn is a shrub - or small tree - spontaneous, which grows easily everywhere, able to reach even 6-10 meters high. It lives mainly in wooded and bushy areas, up to an altitude of 1, 500 meters; it is particularly widespread throughout Europe, in North America, in North Africa and in northern Asia.
The shrub appears to be very branched, and its branches - at first reddish, then greyish - are made up of very numerous sharp spines. The leaves, always deciduous, are alternate and have a rather variable shape, with a toothed margin: from 2 to 4 centimeters long, they are petiolate and deeply incised.
The flowers of the hawthorn, instead, grouped in corymbs from 5 to 25, are hermaphroditic and pentalobated: the white inflorescences open in spring (indicatively between April and May), showing woolly peduncles.
The fruits are elliptic-ovoid pomes, rather small (diameter: 1 cm), painted red: inside they contain a seed, hidden inside the core. Hawthorn fruits ripen in the first winter period, between November and December; as aforementioned, the fruits are used to prepare jams or make syrups, and the minced infructescences - after drying - are used to make flour.
Phytocomplex
In phytotherapy, hawthorn - as we will analyze in more detail in the next article - is widely used to treat arrhythmias, mild heart failure, palpitations, hypertension and anxiety syndrome. The drug consists of flowering tops, leaves, flowers and, only to a limited extent, woody parts: hawthorn is rich above all in flavonoids, leucoanthocyanidins, sterols, amines, catechins, phenolic acids and triterpene and phenolcarboxylic acids. But let's look at the chemical constituents in detail.
The leaves mainly contain flavonoids (vitexin, iso-vitexin, ramnosil-vitexin, rutin, apigenin), monometric leucoanthocyanidins, dimers and trimers, (procyanidins also called picnogenols) also present in fruits.
The flowers, also a source of flavonoids, contain mainly hyperoside (1-3%).
The essential oil gives off a pleasant fragrance thanks to anisic aldehyde.
As we have seen, the phytocomplex is very complex, rendered by a multiplicity of molecules with a similar or different activity: this heterogeneity represents a rather problematic limit for the use of hawthorn-based preparations. In fact, the percentage of different molecules in phytotherapeutic preparations is not defined, because it depends both on the species considered and on the time of collection. both from the compound extraction mode.
In the next article the most important phytotherapeutic properties, toxicity and possible side effects related to the use of hawthorn will be analyzed.
