7 2 Fruits and Fruit- Trees. 



THE CHERRY (Prunus Cerasus). 



To the cherry that sweet and simple, old-fashioned, but 

 ever-welcome summer fruit, so grateful at dessert, so 

 capital for pies, and other useful and elegant addenda to 

 the dinner-table pertains, as to the apple, the pear, and 

 the plum, the old uncertainty as to beginning. Though 

 we are accustomed to hear and speak of the "wild 

 cherry " as if the cultivated one were the same, directly 

 descended from it, changed only in quality, in reality 

 there are two wild cherries ; two forms, at all events, are 

 recognized by authors in general. Each of these may 

 have truly lineal descendants, but the whole question is 

 for the present an open one. 



The most conspicuous of the two forms is the queenly 

 tree well named by Ray, Cerasus sylvestris* tall, rising 

 to the height of thirty or forty feet, destitute of branches 

 for a considerable distance above the ground, especially 

 fond of the brows of steep, over-hanging banks, where it 

 can tower in its snowy pride, no production of nature 

 being more exquisitely white with bloom in the earliest 

 days of summer; and in August loaded with its innu- 

 merable little globose, red or black, and sweetish fruits 

 not, however, for long, if there are birds anywhere near. 



* Usually called, in recent books, Cerasus Avium; a name leading 

 to confusion with the Bird-cherry Prunus Padus, a plant quite 

 different. 



