Did you know that Harry Potter’s broken wand was replaced with blackthorn

Have you noticed that the first flowers on our one of Ireland’s native tree species has being blooming for the past few weeks?

You may have noticed the white five-petalled flowers of blackthorn (draighean as Gaeilge) flowering in hedgerows along roads and field boundaries recently.

This tree can reach a height of five metres. Interestingly blackthorn first produces its flowers before the leaves emerge. I don’t know why blackthorn does this, but potentially it could be related to an adaptation to its habitat.

As it is often found growing alongside a number of other hedgerow plants, by producing its flowers first, this may mean that there is no other competition from other flowering plants, so it's flowers are guaranteed to be pollinated by early emerging bumblebees and other pollinators.

Once flowering is completed the leaves will emerge. These are green, oval and slightly toothed. The fruit is known as the sloe.

Sloes look like small plums blue in colour with a very bitter taste. They are often added along with sugar to gin to make sloe gin. This plant is very prickly as the branches have long thorns.

The wood of blackthorn is covered in a blackish bark and is used to make the Irish shillelagh, a durable wooden walking stick. It is also said that the wood of blackthorn was used to make wizards wands.

For all those Harry Potter fans, you may remember that when Harry's wand was destroyed during the Deathly Hallows, it was replaced with a blackthorn wand.

Focusing on biodiversity, the blackthorn sloes are an important food source for birds, while the dense thorny tree makes ideal nesting habitat for the song thrush and yellowhammer.

In August the leaves are the food plant of the caterpillars of the brown hairstreak butterfly.

According to the website www.irishbutterflies.com, this particular butterfly is very rare with is distribution limited at this time to Co. Clare and surrounding counties.

Will you identify blackthorn in your community this week?

If you would like help identifying a wildlife observation in your community you can contact me on bogs@ipcc.ie.