Hawthorn

Hawthorn addresses a centrally important plant in Irish hedgerow ecology — Crataegus monogyna, the sceach, whose May blossom and autumn haws structure the rural year and whose lone trees in fields are traditionally left undisturbed for fear of disturbing the sídhe. Doyle's carborundum treatment lends itself to hawthorn's massed flowering: the granular plate surface holds soft, clustered tonalities that read as banks of small five-petalled flowers without requiring each blossom to be individually drawn. The technique also handles the dense, thorned branch structure, where the toothed edge of carborundum mark-making suggests bark texture and the angular geometry of hawthorn growth. Within Doyle's broader Irish flora series, the hawthorn print belongs to a hedgerow group — alongside blackthorn, bramble, and elder — that records the structural plants of the field margin rather than the cultivated garden specimen.