The seven English hawthorn trees in this series were started from one-year-old seedlings. During the 1940's and early 1950's the artist collected and trained new seedlings each year, and was charmed to see the changes that took place in each as it developed.

He began to display several of the trees as a series, but by 1965 the number of trees had become too many, and the older trees had become to similar in size and appearance. Thereafter, the number of tree was reduced to 7, and all except oldest were exchanged periodically to keep an even distribution of ages, the oldest tree was trained by the artist for 47 years when the Pacific Rim Bonsai Collection acquire it. Its pot is an appropriately old container that show a greenish color shift due to weathering.