June 24: Wild cherries
Jun. 24th, 2010 09:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neverspentThe wild cherry trees (black cherry, Prunus serotina) fruited weeks ago: long stems with shorter stems at even intervals, each bearing a little green ball. The green cherries have started to turn pink now, and eventually they'll be a red so deep it's black. Young wild cherry trees are easy to recognize by the long, shiny leaves and smooth bark with horizontal white stripes in it. You can even recognize bare twigs, if they're fresh, by scraping the bark with your thumbnail; there's a very distinctive scent which I have heard comes from cyanide. It's entrenched in my sense memory through whittling wild cherry wood.
This tree is growing under a huge old red oak.
My best memory of wild cherries is from the summer I was twelve. I had just discovered that the tree at the entrance to our upper garden was loaded with fruit, and I was determined to harvest as much as possible. (I didn't know how much work it would be to process those tiny, large-seeded cherries for jelly!) So I stood on a ladder for hours, picking and dropping the little fruits into an ice cream bucket while the sky threatened to storm. I clearly remember a soundtrack of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, but it must have been in my head, because I know I didn't own a CD walkman back then, nor would it have occurred to me to take a boombox outdoors.
This tree is growing under a huge old red oak.
My best memory of wild cherries is from the summer I was twelve. I had just discovered that the tree at the entrance to our upper garden was loaded with fruit, and I was determined to harvest as much as possible. (I didn't know how much work it would be to process those tiny, large-seeded cherries for jelly!) So I stood on a ladder for hours, picking and dropping the little fruits into an ice cream bucket while the sky threatened to storm. I clearly remember a soundtrack of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, but it must have been in my head, because I know I didn't own a CD walkman back then, nor would it have occurred to me to take a boombox outdoors.