This plant has poisonous parts
Edible plant
Medicinal Plant

Prunus avium

Wild Cherry, Gean, Massard, Mazzard

Rosaceae, the rose family

Tree

Late spring
Early summer

Late spring
Early summer

These cherries ripen as spring gives way to summer.

Fruit/Berry

Fruit/Berry

Forests, edges of forests, edges of paths, park lands, cultivated areas

Edge habitats, cultivated places, woodlands, and parks

Eastern and Western North America, but not in Utah

Common species

Eurasia and Northern Africa

Look for a small tree with purplish-brown bark, or a medium-sized tree with silvery gray cracked bark, both shiny streaked with horizontal white lines. The shiny, fine-toothed, medium-sized, oval, pointed, alternate leaves have distinct red glands on the leafstalks. Clusters of two to six radially-symmetrical, five-petaled, showy, long-stalked, white flowers grow on the twig tips. Small, smooth, spherical, red, yellow, or black umbrella-like clusters of long-stalked cherries replace the flowers when the weather begins to get hot.

Growing up from 50 to 70 feet tall, with the trunk dominant over the branches, the sweet cherry tree is a feral form of the commercial cherry, created from seed, not from cuttings, so that it's more like ancestral wild cherries than the uniform cultivated clones of orchard and backyards. The symmetrical, conical crown becomes rounded to irregular with age. White, horizontal lines streak the shiny, smooth, purplish-brown bark, which becomes dark silvery gray and fissured with age.

Shiny, fine-toothed, oval, pointed, alternate leaves, which turn orange, pink, or red in the fall, grow from 2.75 to over 5.5 inches long and 1.5 to 2.75 inches wide. The reddish leafstalk, which has two to five small, red glands (nectaries, where insects that protect the tree from herbivores get fed), grows from under an inch to 1.33 inches long.

In early spring, clusters of two to six radially-symmetrical, five-petaled, showy white flowers, each one inch to 1.5 inch across, bloom on the tips of the twigs on flower stalks one to two inches long.

Small, smooth, spherical, red, yellow, or black, long-stalked cherries, 0.5 to one inch across and containing one hard seed 0.33 inches across, ripen close to the start of summer. The stalks of several cherries originate from the same point on the twig.

•Smooth, shiny bark, purplish-brown on young trees, becoming dark silvery gray and cracked with age

•Bark streaked with horizontal white lines

•Shiny, fine-toothed, oval, pointed, alternate leaves 2.75 to over 5.5 inches long and 1.5 to 2.75 inches wide

•Clusters of two to six radially-symmetrical, showy, long-stalked, 5-petaled white flowers, one inch to 1.5 inch across, growing on twig tips

•Small, smooth, spherical red, yellow, or black, long-stalked cherries 0.5 to one inch across

•Stalks of several cherries originating from the same point on the twig

•One hard seed 0.33 inches across inside each cherry

Sweet cherries are often hard to collect because too often, few branches grow within reach. And when a friend who repairs roofs for a living ascended one of these with me, using his mega-ladder, we still had to go out on a limb to reach the fruit. So look for young, relatively small trees at the edges of woodlands and in cultivated parks. You might get a really good crop from these every three to four years.

To collect efficiently, punch a hole in the top of a food container, insert a key ring, and attach it to your belt with a key clip, to free both hands for picking. When your container and stomach are full, transfer your harvest into one of your empty containers and resume picking.

Sweet cherries are smaller and more tart than commercial cherries, with a more intense cherry flavor. Use them raw or cooked like commercial cherries, in sweetened puddings, cakes, cereals, salads, smoothies, pies, ice cream, jams, and other desserts. To remove the seeds cook them with a sweetener and thickener and strain out the seeds using a food mill, or use a cherry pitter or paring knife.

In addition to carbohydrates, cherries provide vitamins C and K, folate; the carotinoids beta-carotene, choline, zeanxanthin, and lutein; and the minerals calcium, iron, magnesium, and phosphorus.

A decoction of the fruit stalks is considered astringent, diuretic and tonic, and has been used to treat cystitis, edema, bronchitis, diarrhea, and anemia. However it contains amygdalin and prunasin, potential sources of cyanide. Small amounts of these substances stimulate respiration, improve digestion, and create a feeling of well-being, but only if they don't release cyanide and kill you first (stick to safer medicinal plants)!

None

Except for the ripe fruit, all parts of the tree contain the toxic cyanogenic glycoside, amygdalin, which may break down into cyanide and cause gasping, weakness, excitement, pupil dilation, spasms, convulsions, coma, respiratory failure, and death, although if you cook the cherries before straining out the pits, the heat will destroy the toxins in the pits.

Black birch bark looks similar to cherry bark, but it's never reddish and has fewer cracks. All the trees' other features differ, and even in the winter, injured cherry twigs smell like bitter almond, whereas black birch trees smell like wintergreen.

Some apple and crab apple trees with white blossoms bloom at the time as sweet cherries, but apple bark is gray and scaly, not smooth, shiny, or streaked with horizontal white lines.

Sometimes sweet cherries get blackish, but they're not the same as our native black cherry, which has flowers and fruit ripening later in the season, and growing along long racemes. Nevertheless, like sweet cherries, black cherries are also sometimes confusingly called wild cherries.

Here’s my healthful version of classic German chocolate cake topped with sweet cherries, that tastes even better than the original.

Dry Ingredients

1 cup (5 oz.) buckwheat flour + 3/4 cup (5 oz.) sweet brown rice flour, or 10 oz. any whole-grain flours
3/4 cup unsweetened Dutch cocoa powder
1/2 cup flax seeds ground into 3/4 cup meal
1 tsp. xanthan gum
1/2 tsp. guar gum
2 tsp. cinnamon, ground
1 tsp. nutmeg, ground
2 tsp. cream of tartar
1 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. cloves, ground

Ingredients to Blend

2 cups soy mil, nut milk, or other non-dairy milk
6 tbs. almond oil
1/4 cup lecithin granules
6 dates
4 common spicebush berries, or 1 tsp. ground allspice
2 tsp. vanilla
1 tbs. liquid stevia

Cherry Topping

2-1/2 cups pitted wild sweet cherries or commercial cherries
1-1/4 cups cherry juice concentrate
1 tbs. agar
5 tsp. arrowroot
1 tsp. liquid stevia
1 tsp dried water mint or commercial mint, ground
1/2 tsp. powdered ginger
1/8 tsp. amaretto extract or almond extract (optional)

Icing

3 cups silken tofu, drained
3/4 cup dates
1/4 cup lecithin granules
2 tbs. almond oil
1 tbs. fresh lemon extract
2 tsp. vanilla
1 tsp. liquid stevia
1/4 tsp. butterscotch extract
1/4 tsp. salt

1. Mix together the dry ingredients.

2. Purée the ingredients to blend in a blender.

3. Mix the purée into the dry ingredients. Don’t overmix.

4. Transfer to 3 oiled 9-inch pie tins and bake in a preheated 350 degree oven for 30 minutes, or until an inserted toothpick emerges dry.

5. Cool on racks.

6. Meanwhile, mix the cherry topping ingredients in a saucepan, bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring constantly, reduce the heat to low and simmer, uncovered, 5 minutes before chilling it.

7. Purée all the icing ingredients in a food processor.

8. Layer the cake with icing, cherry topping, and more cake, until all ingredients are used up.

Serves 8 to 10

Preparation time: 45 minutes

Cooking time: 30 minutes