Phenology: cherries

[redbird]

Walking home a few days ago, I heard a bird singing in a tree. I looked up, hoping to see the bird. Instead, I saw cherries hanging from the high branches.

That shouldn't be surprising. Cherry trees grow cherries, right?

I've lived in this neighborhood since 1987, and walked past that tree thousands of times, at all seasons of the year. cattitude and I went and took a look this evening, and there are lots of cherries hanging from the branches, high and fairly low. The fruit is still quite small, of course.

My only guess so far is that cherries aren't self-fertilizing, and this year pollen from another tree, possibly the relatively young weeping cherry across the street, fertilized the flowers on this tree.

Another odd aspect of this: When we moved in, this tree had two different colors of flower, on different branches. Some years ago, for either medical or aesthetic reasons, the nuns whose building it grows outside had the grafted-on branches removed, so now all the flowers are white. If my hypothesis above is correct, I don't know why the grafted-on pink branches didn't cause the tree to set fruit, nor yet bear fruit themselves.

Comments

[daharyn.livejournal.com]

Hmm. The sour cherry tree in my parents' front yard appears to bear fruit on its own; it's the only one in the immediate vicinity, IIRC.

(I didn't realize you'd lived up thataways so long; it was my target neighborhood -- alas, out of reach -- when I moved back here in '06.)

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Oh wow. Are they sour cherries? Can you reach a few on your way to the subway this morning? (They don't seem to sell sour cherries, other than already as jam and pie, so it's hard for me to get them, now that I don't have a sour cherry tree in my backyard.)

[redbird]

I doubt they're ripe yet, though I could be mistaken; beyond that, I would, I think, need a ladder and/or an agile friend or random neighborhood ten-year-old.

I think I've seen sour cherries in the Union Square Greenmarket, but I'm not sure how to get them to you.

[amaebi.livejournal.com]

Most cherries are not self-fertile, and there are tables to look up which cross-pollinate well or poorly-- but the matches are typically based, to the best of my knowledge, on bloom time rather than on anything more subtle.

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

I am strangely relieved to read this post. We had lived in our old place for ten years when suddenly the lemon tree and apple bush in the backyard suddenly sprouted fruit. I had thought the lemon tree dead and had no idea what the other strange bush was.