Image below is the re-crop:
I was just trying out an alternative crop to remove couple of thorns for few reasons:
1) The thorns on the left of the image were clipped (in the original). Hence I thought of removing them altogether.
2) The foreground (or FG) in focus thorn could get better prominence/importance if the total number of elements cud be reduced hence bringing the viewer's eye to the in-focus-thorn in FG.
3) By cropping from left we would also be 'off-centering' the main in-focus FG thorn (it comes to the left). The FG thorn wud then be 'sitting' on the thirds' intersection point making a better visual impact.
This illustration is just an idea. May be some minor adjustments wud make it better...
I have not made any corrections to the contrast. Some playing around with channel mixer (for B&W conversion) might make it look better. Since the image was already in gray scale, I could not adjust the individual colours (in B&W mode).
These were totally my personal opinion. Would be interesting in knowing your thoughts on this...
regards,
Kaushik