WILD RED CHERRY 



(Prunus Pennsylvania!) 



IN addition to the name wild red cherry by which this tree is known in 

 most parts of its range, it is called bird cherry in Maine, New Hamp- 

 shire, New York, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Iowa; red cherry in Maine 

 and Rhode Island; fire cherry in New York and many other localities; 

 pin cherry in Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, Michigan, Iowa, and 

 North Dakota; pigeon cherry in Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode 

 Island, New York, Ontario, and North Dakota; and wild cherry in 

 Tennessee and New York. Its range extends from Newfoundland to 

 Hudson bay, west to British Columbia, south through the Rocky 

 Mountains to Colorado, and in the East along the Appalachian ranges to 

 North Carolina and Tennessee. It reaches its largest size among the 

 Big Smoky mountains hi Tennessee and North Carolina. 



It is ordinarily a tree thirty or forty feet high, and from eight to 

 ten inches in diameter, though trunks are sometimes twenty inches 

 through. It grows fast, but is very short-lived. Many stands disappear 

 in thirty years or less, but individuals survive two or three tunes that 

 long, if they stand in open ground. One of its names is fire cherry, and 

 that fitly describes it. Like paper birch and lodgepole pine, it follows 

 forest fires where the ground is laid bare by the burning. Nature seems 

 to have made peculiar provisions whereby this tree clothes barren tracts 

 which have been recently burned. In the first place, it a prolific seeder. 

 Its small, red cherries are borne by bushels on very young trees. Birds 

 feed on them almost exclusively while they last, and the seeds are scatter- 

 ed over the surrounding country. They have such thick shells that 

 few germinate unless they pass through a moderate fire, which cracks the 

 shells, or at least they do not sprout until they come in direct contact 

 with mineral soil. When a fire burns a forest, thousands of the cherry 

 seedlings spring up. Many persons have wondered where they come 

 from so quickly. They were already scattered among the forest leaves 

 before the fire passed. The heat crazed then- shells, and the burning 

 of the leaflitter let them down on the mineral soil where they germinated 

 and soon came up by thousands. The case is a little different with paper 

 birch and with aspen, which are also fire trees. Their seeds cannot 

 pass through fire without perishing, and when birches and aspens follow 

 a fire it means that the seeds were scattered by the wind after the passing 

 of the fire. Doubtless cherry seeds are often scattered after the fire has 

 passed; but it is believed that most of those which spring up so quickly 

 have passed through the fire without being destroyed. 



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