Cherry Fact & Fiction

Hello and welcome back to another week of rooted! This week we’re focusing on one of the most celebrated fruits of the season- cherry! We’ve got a lot to get through in this one, so grab a snack, and get ready to learn along with me. Cherries are members of the rosacea family, but specifically in the genus prunus, with famous relatives like roses, strawberries, almonds, and plums. Interestingly, cherries are separated into 3 separate subtypes in botany because there are so many of them. Those three types are true cherries, bush cherries, and bird cherries.

True cherries are the ones most of us are thinking of when we think of cherries. They are usually on trees, have smooth fruits without grooves. Their flowers grow in bunches, and they have single growth point per axel (so only one new branch per growth point, which gives them a very clean looking canopy and shape.)

Bush cherries are well- bushes, and they have smaller fruits that typically grow in groups of threes- these are your sand cherries, rock cherries- those kind of guys.

FInally we have bird cherries, which is honestly kind of a catch all category. This grouping includes things like cherry laurels, chokecherries, and black cherries.

We’ll likely dig into a lot of these plants in some later episodes, but for today we’re mostly going to be focused on true cherries, specifically the ones with fruits we like to eat.Sweet cherries are native to europe, western asia, and parts of north africa, but have since been spread pretty much everywhere since we started cultivating them as early as 72 BC- my brain really bent on that one…but apparently they’ve been tasty for pretty much forever, so people started wanting to keep them around.

Cherry trees tend to get anywhere from 6 to 40 feet tall, with a canopy anywhere from 5 to 25 ft wide. They usually prefer well draining soil with plenty of nutrients, and will need a pretty solid watering in order to support healthy fruit growth. Often they also need a period of cold to help the fruit set- usually about 800 hours of cooler temps!

Cherries tend to be sort of delicate and needy when it comes to care, but because they are so tasty, we all tend to look the other way. Outside of the cooler temps, they also are often not self fertile, and need to be cross pollinated…but lots of varieties can’t cross pollinate either, so you have to be a bit strategic with what you are planting! There are some varieties that we have bred to be self fertile, but they do tend to get snatched up quickly!

Sour cherries are kind of an exception to this, but they are smaller and we usually cook those, so they are likely what you’re buying when you buy a pie filling of jam!

Not only is it hard to get them to put on ruit, but that fruit can also be kind of tricky to harvest, since it is so small and kind of delicate. Most of it is harvested by hand (with the help of a cherry picker in modern day farming) or by using a machine to literally shake the tree, scattering the fruit onto blankets underneath- this is also commonly how people harvest almonds and olives!

As if that wasn’t tricky enough, cherries are also kind of notorious for getting pests- mostly because they are so tasty. The worst thing they are afflicted by (in my opinion) is canker, which is actually a bacterial issue that causes necrosis in the tree, causing the bark to pull back, the leaves to develop holes, and some of the nastiest looking scabs I have ever seen. One summer when I was working at a nursery, I was usually the first person customers would see and I helped manage the phone, so I cannot tell you how many unsolicited canker pics I have been subjected to. When I close my eyes I can still see them…

But it turns out im not the only one that’s haunted. In japanese legends there are MANY stories about trees who are inhabited by the spirits of samurai’s or other folx who died honorably in servie to their country or someone they loved. These are normally marked by abnormal blooms, and while those stories ARE really interesting, we’ll be going over them in more detail in a special episode since they really deserve more time and focus!

But fret not- we’re still going to dig into some japanese lore!

In one of my favorite stories, Konohanasakuya-hime - the goddess of cherry blossoms, mt. fuji, and active volcanoes, gets caught in the middle of a sort of taming of the shrew situation.

In this story, a man- ninigi- who happens to be the son of the sun god, falls in love with our girl sakuya-hime. When we goes to ask for her hand in marriage, her father suggests he marry her sister- Iwa-Naga-hime, who- true to her nature, basically had a heart of stone…she was the rock princess.

Anyway- ninigi was dead set on marrying sakuya-hime, who was not only pretty but also the one he had fallen in love with…that being said, he was awfully rude about the whole ordeal. So, Iwa-naga-hime, knowing her worth, but maybe being a little extra, cursed all of humanity to be as delicate and short-lived as her sister’s blooming beauty, cursing us all to have short lives….I guess I get it? But kinda rude.

Anyway, you would hope that after that the marriage would be happy, right? Well, not exactly. Sakuya-hime falls pregnant the first night they are married, but ninigi doubts it’s his child, and instead assumes she tricked him into marrying her just to have help raising her child. To prove him wrong, sakuya-hime decides to put it to a high stakes test….she locks the baby in a house, sets it on FIRE, and explains that if the child lives it’s ninigi’s…and well, out from the ashes of a house, a perfectly unscathed baby was pulled out. This later goes on to explain why in many cultures cherry blossoms and branches were used as a sort of protective symbol that would watch over expectant mothers and ensure they had a safe, smooth birth and a healthy baby.

In another story rooted in slight spite and involving babies, mary and joseph (of christian fame) are walking through a cherry orchard, when a super pregnant mary asked joseph to pick her some fruit…clearly egar to prove he wasn’t at all salty about his wife being chosen to birth the messiah, he said maybe she should ask the father of her child to pick them for her..

Jesus, upon hearing joseph’s comment, asks the cherry tree to lower it’s branches so that Mary can pick her own damn cherries, leaving joseph to stand on the orchard, mouth agape, like the scrub he was… this was such a slay moment for mary and Jesus that in the 1600’s they actually wrote what would now be an absolute pop ballad- the cherry carol- about this incident…they walked so the next carpenter- sabrina carpenter- could run.

Meanwhile in scotland, the land was just a tad divided on cherries, with half the land swearing that cherries- also sometimes called hagberries- belonged to the witches, and anyone who brought the wood into their home would be cursed.

On the other half, people believed that walking sticks made of cherry would prevent the user from getting lost in the mist- feeling the cherry was inherently helpful and healing.

As a related fun fact, cherry wood is actually some of the best wood to make bagpipes, which probably helped folx on the witch side of things come back around to liking it.

But one group who has never hated cherries? Magpies. These bad boys were at one time rumored to need at least 3 full meals of cherries before they would stop screaming..which honestly is SO valid.

But what would eating 3 full meals of cherries do to the human body? Well, in old times, cherry was often relied on as a way to treat chronic cough, to fight inflammation, and help with general illness.

As an added fun fact, this is why our cough medicine still tastes like cherry- since it was a commonly added ingredient in cough syrup, and it’s sweet taste helped to make some of the other herbal additives more palatable.

Cherry was effective in this way because it has anti-inflammatory, expectorant, and sedative properties.

As a key ingredient in the sleepy girl mocktail, cherries make us sleepy primarily because they increase our levels of melatonin because they contain tryptophan, an amino acid we use to naturally produce melatonin. Melatonin makes us feel tired because it regulates our circadian rhythm. About 2 hours before you typically fall asleep, the bosy starts making melatonin as a sort of wind down- truly the most natural sleepy girl mocktail out there.

Cherries have also played a historically large role in cocktails AND poisons..

As far as cocktails go, cherry was a key component in spirit making due to it’s use in making barrels. Cherry barrels have medium sized pores, which allow the liquor inside to permeate, taking on sweet notes of stonefruit. The wood is expensive though, making the liquor made in those barrels VERY desirable (and pretty expensive).

In Alternative forms of spirit making, cherry pits can technically be used as a murder weapon, but not in the way you might expect. Like many members of the prunus genus, cherry pits contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide.

Cyanide is toxic to us because it essentially puts our cells in a choke hold, slipping past our defenses and binding to our cells, causing them to basically shrivel up and die by preventing them from producing ATP. For that reason, all forms of cyanide are technically considered blood agents .

Hydrogen cyanide was first used as an agent of chemical warfare by the french in world war one, then by the nazis in world war two in zyklon b, which the initially developed as a pesticide to fight the louse/flea population in concentration camps by mixing it with diatomaceous earth and some other nasty stuff… however, once they realized how effective it was against insects, they unfortunately decided to use it on people, killing over 1.1 million people.

After that, we really stopped using hydrogen cyanide in most other stuff. BUT plenty of other murders have been tied back to cyanide, as it takes very little to be effective, works pretty quickly, and can be tricky to detect based on symptoms alone, which include general weakness, nausea, headache, and difficulty breathing.

Outside of murder, cherries are also obviously a popular snack, and commonly preserved to put into baked goods. Baked goods so tasty that Henry the 8th insisted cherries be introduced to England after he tasted them in belgium.

Outside of baked goods, jams, and other tasty snacks, cherry tree resin was also used as gum at one point, which might just be my new favorite fun fact!

As one of the most anticipated fruits of summer, I hope you’re enjoying it every chance you get! Next time you spot on- out on a walk- on at the store, I hope you take a second to say hello, and maybe contemplate if your current situation seems like it could be improved with bag pipes.

That’s all I’ve got for this week, but we’ll be back next week with some new plant facts!

Sources:

Scary Stonefruit & Haunted Gum- Cherry

Juicy Fan Fic & Labors of Love- Strawberry

Episode 63: Botanical Bafflement & Tyrannical Treats- Watermelon