Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by JD Walker, author of A Witch's Guide to Wildcraft and the new Under the Sacred Canopy. In temperate zones of the Northern Hemisphere, we have many harbingers of Spring in the forest. Leaves are flushing out; bulbs are in bloom and fruit trees are beginning to set fruit. One important Spring tree is the hawthorn (Crataegus). As an understory tree in the forest, you might overlook its clusters of white blossoms, but there is no doubt that the hawthorn has been important in many of our oldest traditions. From Greek deities of love and marriage to witches and fairies of all sorts, the hawthorn seems to have been beloved (or sometimes feared)