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Black Cherry

Prunus serotina

Summary 6

Prunus serotina, commonly called black cherry, wild black cherry, rum cherry, or mountain black cherry, is a native deciduous tree of the genus Prunus. Despite being called black cherry, it is not very closely related to the commonly cultivated cherries such as sweet cherry (P. avium), sour cherry (P. cerasus) and Japanese flowering cherries hwhich belong to Prunus subg Cerasus. Instead, P. serotina belongs to Prunus subg. Padus, which also includes Eurasian bird cherry (P. padus) and chokecherry (P. virginiana). The species is widespread and common in North America and South America.

Prunus serotina is a medium-sized, fast-growing forest tree growing to a height of 50 - 80 feet. The leaves are 2–5 inches long, ovate-lanceolate in shape, with finely toothed margins. Fall leaf color is yellow to red. Flowers are small, white and 5-petalled, in racemes 4–6 in long which contain several dozen flowers. The flowers give rise to reddish-black "berries" (drupes) fed on by birds, 1⁄4–3⁄8 inch in diameter.

For about its first decade the bark of a black cherry tree is thin, smooth, and banded, resembling a birch. A mature tree has very broken, dark gray to black bark. The leaves are long and shiny, resembling a sourwood's. An almond-like odour is released when a young twig is scratched and held close to the nose, revealing minute amounts of cyanide compounds produced and stored by the plant as a defense mechanism against herbivores.

In the early 1900's P. serotina from North America was widely planted in the Netherlands, because it grows well on poor sandy soils and in the dunes. It developed extremely rapidly there, at the cost of indigenous forest plants and became such a plague that Dutch foresters gave it the nickname 'forest pest'.

Sources and Credits

  1. (c) Dom Col, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC), uploaded by Dom Col
  2. (c) anonymous, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC), https://eol.org/media/8773235
  3. (c) allysonv, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC), uploaded by allysonv
  4. (c) Douglas Goldman, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC), uploaded by Douglas Goldman
  5. (c) greenwitchvera, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC), uploaded by greenwitchvera
  6. Adapted by Tom Pollard from a work by (c) Wikipedia, some rights reserved (CC BY-SA), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prunus_serotina

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