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Cherry
There are two types of cherries that are commonly grown: the sour cherry which is the most popular and is widely adapted is used in processing and pies, and the sweet cherry which may be eaten directly off the tree. Two varieties of either type should be planted for cross-pollination
Two cherry types are grown for their fruit, the `sweet', dessert (Prunus avium) and the `sour', culinary (Prunus cerasus). A third type, the 'Duke' cherries, such as the Northstar form an intermediate class. The sweet are subdivided into the 'black' and 'white' varieties. All fruiting cherries are hardy except in the extreme north though the blossoms may be damaged by late spring frosts.
Cherry trees range in size, from 6 to 30 feet tall depending on the cultivar. There are also some shrub cherry cultivars such as 'Red Nanking' cherry.
In addition there is the Japanese flowering cherry (Prunus subhirtella) which is a cultivar of Japanese flowering cherry or Oriental cherry. It can grow to 20 to 35 feet tall. New leaves are reddish, and mature to lustrous dark green, and then change to red or bronze in the fall. The profuse, fragrant spring flowers can be single or double, white or a shade of pink, from half an inch to almost 3 inches across. The fruit is dark purple. However, the Japanese flowering cherry is short-lived and beset by many insect and disease problems.
Adding the right flowering trees and shrubs to your landscape will ensure an explosion of color in early spring. Choose carefully, and you'll have a bonus of branches you can bring indoors. For the best results you should understand what you can do before the season, get placement tips, and read up on forcing basics.
Named varieties of cherries can be propagated on rootstocks by budding in July and August, or by grafting in March. Seedling Mazzard and the clonal Malling F 12/1 rootstocks are used usually for rootstocks. A mature sweet cherry tree may be up to 30 ft tall with a corresponding spread, too large for the average garden but bush Morello (sour) trees rarely exceed a height of 15ft. A genetic dwarf, Northstar, is available with characteristics between the sweet cherry and sour cherry.
Sour cherries do well in almost
any situation and are particularly valuable for training as fan trees against a
north-facing wall unsuited to other fruits. Although sweet cherries can also be
grown as fans, they dislike hard pruning and are happiest as standards or half
standards given minimum pruning. Plant standards 30ft apart, half
standards 25ft, and bush and fan trees 15ft apart. Cherries as a class dislike
poorly drained, heavy soils. The sweet varieties do well on deep, light to
medium loams while the sour ones will tolerate poor soils, as long as it
is not
waterlogged.
Morello cherries are self-fertile and will pollinate any sweet cherry that flowers at the same time.
Most sweet cherries are infertile with their own pollen and often with certain
other varieties so it is important to select varieties for interplanting whose
blossom period coincides or overlaps. A few varieties called universal donors
are compatible with all groups flowering at the same time. The dessert cherry
season extends from mid-June to mid-August and is somewhat dependent on weather.
Culinary kinds are used throughout the year for cooking, or making into jam, pie or cherry juice.
Cultivation
Young trees, five years old or less, transplant the best. Planting can be
carried out at any time from mid October to mid-March, whenever the soil can be
worked.
To transplant excavate a wide hole just deep enough to allow the roots to be covered with 4-6 in. of soil. Plant firmly and stake securely. Shortening the previous season's growth on the leading branches by half, and side shoots to 3in. was formerly recommended but some recent research has begun to question that advice. For further information concerning the proposed changes, Color With Plants - Plant Health Care. In the spring, mulching the soil surface over the root area with composted vegetable refuse or decayed straw or other organic matter will help keep the ground moist and deter weeds. . Do not let weeds encroach for at least the first few years.
Sweet cherries fruit chiefly on the spurs formed freely on the older wood. Pruning consists in maintaining the tree to an open habit with an evenly balanced head, together with the removal of dead, crossing and rubbing branches. This minimal pruning should be confined to the spring and early summer when infection from silver leaf disease is least likely.
Sour cherries fruit on shoots formed the previous season. After the basic fan (espalier) of branches has been built up by shortening the leaders annually as for sweet cherries, annually replaced side growths are tied in parallel to the permanent branches. The replacement shoots are selected during May to August, Choose one shoot near the base of a fruiting shoot and another at its tip to draw sap to the fruit; all others are pinched out when quite small. The tip of the terminal shoot itself is pinched out when 3-4 ins. of growth has been made.
Protecting the fruit from bird damage is usually necessary, using fish nets or rayon spider's web material on trees of a suitable size, or where trees are too large to net by a bird scaring device. After the cherries have been harvested, the fruit shoots are pruned back at their junction with the selected replacement shoots. The latter are then tied in neatly as before.
Cherries appreciate a spring mulch of farmyard manure at the rate of 1cwt to 10 sq. yd, or 2-3oz per sq. yd. If manure is unobtainable, an autumn application of 1-2oz per sq. yd of sulphate of potash (potassium sulfate). Trees on walls respond to being fed with liquid manure.
Plant cherry trees in full sun, in soil that drains well and on a high point of a south facing slope so frost gathering in low pockets will not damage the tree or the fruit. If cherry trees are close to the south or west side of a building, they can also bloom too early in the spring and be damaged by frost.
The
most dependable fruit producers are sour cherries that don't need another
variety for cross pollination. In eastern NM, sour cherries are more
dependable than sweet cherries. Good sour cherry varieties include
Montmorency, North Star, Montmore, Meteor, English Morello, Early
Richmond, Hansen bush cherry and Nanking.
Sweet cherries are more dependable in the west, but sometimes will work in the more urban areas of the east part of the state. Index, Lapins, Stella and Sweetheart are sweet cherry varieties which don't need another tree to pollinate. All other varieties of sweet cherries need a second variety for cross pollination.
Insect and disease problems that affect cherries include peach tree
borers, cherry slugs and cytospora canker. Control peach tree borers with
insecticide to the lower part of the trunk during the first week of July.
Cherry slugs are the larvae of a sawfly. They suck the juices from the
leaves during the summer, leaving only a skeleton. They also are reported
to be carriers of Cherry decline, a disease that is caused by a suspect
agent: unknown phytoplasma. Many home plantings of
cherry trees have been killed in the Albuquerque area by this disease.
Spraying a general purpose insecticide or dusting wood ashes on the leaves
will quickly kill the larvae. But once infected the tree will die rather
quickly.
Cytospora canker is a fungal disease which can be controlled by pruning
diseased branches. If this disease infects the trunk, the tree will often
need to be removed.
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( Prunus Avium)
The three wild forms of cherry trees are popularly distinguished under the names Bird Cherry (P. Padus), Wild Cherry, or Gean (P. Avium), and Dwarf Cherry (P. Cerasus); and though they agree in their botanical characters and geographical distribution, yet there are distinctive points which are sufficiently obvious to be explained in simple language.
The geographical range of the three forms is nearly the same, namely, from the Himalayas, through Western Asia, Northern Africa, and Europe; but the Dwarf Cherry seems the more restricted form, not occurring either in Scotland or in Africa, whilst the Bird Cherry occurs in the Arctic regions both of Europe and of Asia.
Cherries are classified, by the various details in their structure. They are related to that great group of plants known as the Rose tribe. This tribe embraces, the Oak, great numbers of trees, Roses, Brambles, Strawberries, Cinquefoils, and Meadow-sweets, and also Apples, Pears, Medlars, Quinces, Hawthorns, Black-thorns and Plums. These are united by botanists in the genus Prunus, a group mainly characterized by the structure of its well-known fruit, which is called a "drupe." It is the enlarged ovary of the flower, the calyx of which has fallen. It is one-chambered, contains but one, or at most two, kernels or seeds, and is plainly divisible into an outer skin, a fleshy pulp, and a stone enclosing the kernel or kernels.There are two differences, however, that clearly distinguish the Blackthorns and Plums from the Cherries; in the former the two halves of the blade in the young leaf, when in the bud, are rolled up like a scroll, while in the Cherries they are folded together like the two halves of a sheet of note-paper. In the Plum group the fruit is covered by the beautiful and familiar waxy bloom, that serves to shoot off the rain-drops but the fruit of a Cherry is smooth and has brilliantly burnished surface.
The Bird Cherry (P. Padus) is more distinct from the others. It is a small tree with one main trunk, reaching ten or twenty feet in height. Its leaves are smooth, and finely and regularly toothed; but its chief distinctive mark is the arrangement of the blossoms, which is what is technically known as a "raceme"--i.e., the flowers, which are numerous, spring singly on short stalklets from an elongated pendulous axis. The fruit is small, round, and black, harshly bitter in taste, and encloses a round wrinkled stone. The astringent bark of this species has been proposed as a substitute for quinine.
The Gean (P. Avium), is a tree from twenty to thirty feet or more in height, and with q trunk that is sometimes more than nine inches in diameter. It grows in dry, rocky woods, and yields a beautiful red timber, fine grained, and tough enough for tool-handles. The leaves are drooping, and downy on their under surfaces, and the flowers, which are produced somewhat later, are arranged in "umbels"--i.e., each on a rather long stalk springing with the others from one point, like the ribs of an umbrella. The fruit is heartshaped, firm in flesh, and not very juicy, bitter in taste, and either black or red. From it is distilled the Kirschwasser of Germany, and it is probably the wild original of the Morella.
The Dwarf Cherry (P. Cerasus) is a bushy shrub, from three to eight feet in height, with a reddish bark, and with short-stalked, erect, and coarsely-notched leaves. Its flowers, too, are arranged in umbles, and its fruit is round, red, and acid, being distinguished by this acidity and by the comparative abundance of its juice. It is believed to be the origin of our sweet garden Cherries; though, even if this be so, it does not militate against the statement that the latter are a late introduction from Asia, whilst the Dwarf Cherry appears truly wild over a large part of Europe.
With so much beauty, and being valuable timber, it is strange that the Cherry should have attracted little attention from John Evelyn, the pioneer of English forestry. The maraschino is manufactured from an allied species in Dalmatia and the north of Italy. Its timber is a close-grained red wood that is easily worked and takes a fine polish almost equal to mahogany. It is often requested for the manufacture of certain musical instruments, and is valued as a forest tree. The Gean (P. Avium) will grow straight upwards if planted close together; and, since it is a fast-growing tree, is adapted for planting as a "nurse" for oak, for admixture with the slower-growing, but longer-lived, timber-trees, to draw them up, being subsequently felled to make room for their further development. The Cherry, when grown under these circumstances may reach a height of sixty or seventy feet in fifty or sixty years; and though it will then be cut so that the forest monarch may rule alone in his domain. Up to that time, owing to the loose and ascending arrangement of its boughs, the cherry will not require pruning to let in the light upon the young oaks.
Single trees look beautiful, though their suckers may be objectionable in a lawn.As landscape trees, cherries can puzzle and exasperate growers. Perfection of flowering may be elusive, with a common problem called "brown rot" affecting flowers and leaves. It appears on both edible and ornamental cherries and is caused by a fungus that results in blight. The infection begins when fungal spores attack the flower buds of the cherry or plum as they begin to open in spring. Infected flowers wilt, turn brown, and die before unfolding fully. The dying flowers look crushed and have a grayish or brownish hue. Damaged blooms remain on the twigs after infection, and become covered with a grayish-brown fungal growth that is worsened by wet spring weather. If we have less rain than usual during April, this common fungal problem may be lessened, but it will spread with only a few wet days and presence of fungal material to initiate the infection. The fungus organism, Monilinia fructicola, grows best when the temperature is above 40 degrees and weather is damp. Another brown rot fungus, Monilinia laxa, appears at temperatures above 55 degrees. Often both types will exist on affected trees.
The fungal infection perpetuates itself by reproduction from affected blooms, leaves, and fruit hanging in the tree over the winter. Good clues to this disease are the crumbled old blossoms, dead twigs, and dead leaves that have remained on the plant through winter. Once established in the bloom, the infection may spread to twigs and shoots. Infected twigs develop sunken cankers that may have gumming at the margins. Leaves on the twig will die but will stay attached to the twig.
If the plant is a fruiting cherry, infection may not appear until after the fruit begins to ripen. Soft brownish spots on the fruit will gradually expand until the fruit is covered with gray-brown fungal spores. A cherry grower who has succeeded in preventing birds from eating the crop can certainly become discouraged when brown rot attacks the ripening fruit.
When cherry blooms are swelling and beginning to open, check the trees for dead looking areas and mummified fruit left from previous infections. Prune out as much of the affected and damaged parts as possible. It's easier to see them when the trees just begin bloom when it is easier to distinguish dead from living areas. Remove and destroy diseased twigs as you spot them, continuing to do this throughout the summer. Don't compost this diseased material. (Cleaning out the dead material is obviously easier on a small tree than on a large 30-foot cherry. Many infections simply grow beyond the capacity of the gardener to deal with them. A professional pruner can help.) In addition to pruning to remove dead material, be sure to prune to open the tree to good air circulation, which will help it dry from rains. Rake and clean up under the tree during the summer to remove all fallen blossoms, leaves, and fruit. Keeping the ground raked of litter under fruit trees helps with all disease management. (rake up fallen apple leaves that show scab, for instance.). Gardeners can often avoid using fungicide on brown rot by simply keeping damage pruned out and garden litter cleaned up.
But if the tree is a prominent landscape specimen and damage is severe, and you choose to use fungicides, apply them at the correct time and in the correct sequence. Spray the tree three times during the bloom period: suggested intervals are 'early, when you see red or pink showing on the buds'; one more spray when the tree is in full bloom, and a final spray after the petals have dropped.
Flowering Cherries, Weeping Cherry Trees
Weeping cherry trees must be included in any Top 10 list of weeping trees, since they are spectacular flowering trees as well. In fact, below I mention two additional flowering cherry trees that do not have a weeping habit, so as not to shortchange this indispensable component of spring landscaping.
The weeping Higan cherry can be grown in zones 4-8. Weeping Higan cherry trees (Prunus subhirtella 'Pendula') produce pink to white flowers in profusion, if grown in full sun and well-drained soil. This weeping cherry tree attains a height of 20'-30' and a spread 15'-25'.
"Snow Fountains" weeping cherry (Prunus 'Snow Fountains' or 'Snofozam') is suitable for landscapes in zones 5-8. Height 8'-15', spread 6'-8'. Snow Fountains blooms best in full sun and well-drained soil. A slow-growing ornamental, the branches of this weeping cherry cascade right down to the ground.But while on the subject of flowering ornamental cherry trees, it's hard to pass over a couple of widely grown upright (i.e., non-weeping) specimens. Japanese flowering cherry, or Kwanzan cherry (Prunus serrulata 'Kwanzan') grows 15'-25' x 15'-25'. Its white to pink blooms will be most impressive when the tree is grown in full sun with good drainage. Zones 5-8.
Another cherry tree with an upright habit, the purple leaf sand cherry (Prunus x cistena) is suitable for growing in zones 3-8. Purple leaf sand cherry has a moderate growth rate and, like the other cherries, prefers full sun and a well-drained soil. Height 7'-14', spread 7'-10'. An added bonus with this ornamental cherry is its striking summer-long reddish-purple foliage and its fragrant flowers.
