Local gardens, woodlands lush with spring-flowering cherries

After the red of early maple flowers and the soft gray-green of aspen tassels, a chronological blooming of white-flowered native trees and shrubs begins. From the banks of rivers and streams, serviceberries greet shad and alewife swimming in from the sea to spawn. Before these shadbushes drop their last petals, the chokecherries and bird cherries begin to flower, followed in due course by black cherry and then the arrowwood viburnums and elderberries.

Of the three native cherries, the chokecherry, or Prunus virginiana, is the least garden worthy and is best left to the truly wild landscape, to sunny clearings along the woodland edge and fence rows. Often more of a multistem shrub than a tree, it has a colonizing habit, producing thickets of genetically similar stems all sprouted from a common root system. It will quickly outgrow its allocated space in any managed landscape.

Chokecherry is also highly susceptible to black knot fungus, a parasite that gives the tree a tumor-infested appearance, particularly in winter when the persistent warty growths are not hidden from view by foliage.

The remaining two species, bird cherry, P. pensylvanica, and black cherry, P. serotina, do deserve a place in the garden, both for ornament and attracting wildlife. Both are tall trees but they differ markedly in growth rate and longevity. Bird cherry – often called fire cherry because it is one of the pioneer trees that quickly occupy a burned or forested area – is a short-lived tree, eventually giving way to native birches and other hardwoods.

Black cherry, while slower-growing, can live for up to 200 years. The fact that we do not see many large black cherries, particularly with straight trunks, can be attributed to the harvest of their beautiful smooth-grained wood for furniture. Most old black cherries found in the wild today have contorted trunk growth that made them worthless to hardwood buyers.

Where Marjorie’s garden meets the woodland edge, bird cherries of various ages are about to bloom. For a week or so in May they will become clouds of white, their branches filled with simple five-petaled flowers swarming with bees. As the season advances, their leaves will provide food for numerous species of butterfly and moth caterpillars and, later in the year, the berries will feed ruffed grouse, woodpeckers, cedar waxwings, thrushes and grosbeaks. Cherries that make it to the ground will be quickly taken by black bears, red foxes, chipmunks, rabbits, mice and squirrels.

Black cherry’s white blossoms are borne in drooping clusters just after the new leaves have appeared. The purple-black, pea-sized cherries ripen in late summer and are quickly taken by the same assortment of birds and small mammals that eat the fruits of bird cherry. I also remember students grabbing handfuls of ripe black cherries from trees on the Orono campus, a quick snack between classes. I found them slightly bitter, barely palatable, but am told that with the addition of a little sugar they make an excellent jelly.

Black cherry has a handsome bark, dark with scaly patches that curl horizontally away from the trunk at their edges. When we get around to planting a black cherry in Marjorie’s garden, we will place it where we can enjoy this rugged texture and rich color in the midst of winter white.

Send queries to Gardening Questions, P.O. Box 418, Ellsworth 04605, or to rmanley@ptc-me.net. Include name, address and telephone number.