40 THE CHERRIES OF NEW YORK 



Cherry, Prunus avium, with the histories of which we are now to be 

 concerned. 



PHny is generally accredited as the first historian of the cherry. 

 Nearly eighteen and a half centuries ago he gave an account of the cherries 

 of Rome with the statement that LucuUus, the Roman soldier and gourmet, 

 had brought them to Rome 65 years before Christ^ from the region of 

 the Black Sea. This particular in the account proves to be a good illus- 

 tration of the adage that old errors strike root deeply. Though disproved 

 beyond all question of doubt time and time again by botanists and 

 historians, Pliny's inadvertence is still everywhere current in text-books, 

 pomologies and cyclopaedias — a mis-statement started, repeated and 

 perpetuated from -medieval days when to be printed in Pliny was sufficient 

 proof. That Lucullus brought to Italy a cherry and one which the 

 Romans did not know there is no reason to doubt, but other cherries there 

 must have been, not only wild but cultivated, of Prunus cerasus at least 

 and probably of Prunus avium, and in comparative abundance long before 

 Lucullus, returning from the war in Pontus with Mithridates, brought to 

 Rome a cherry. With this brief mention of Pliny's inaccuracy, we pass 

 to more substantial facts in the history of the cherry. 



The domestication of one or the other of the two generally cultivated 

 species of cherries followed step by step the changes from savagery to 

 civilization in the countries of Europe and of western Asia. For, as one 

 sorts the accumulated stores of botanical and historical evidence, it becomes 

 quickly apparent that both the Sweet and the Sour Cherry now grow wild 

 and long have done so in the region named and that, from the time 

 tillage of plants was first practiced in the Old World, this fruit has been 

 under cultivation, feeble, obscure, and interrupted by war and chase 

 though its cultivation may have been. Certainly the history of the cherry 

 is as old as that of agriculture in the southern European countries and is 

 interwritten with it. 



In beginning the history of a cultivated plant the first step is to 

 ascertain where it grows spontaneously — where it may be found unplanted 

 and unattended by man. This is the task now before us for Prunus 

 cerasus and Prunus avium, discussing them in the order named. 



' See quotation on page 45. 



