Enduring Roots: Encounters with Trees, History, and the American Landscape

Chapter 4. Three Cherries

C H A P T E R F O U R three cher r ies FLOWER: THE REPRODUCTIVE PORTION OF THE PLANT, CONSISTING OF STAMENS, PISTILS, OR BOTH, AND USUALLY INCLUDING A PERIANTH OF SEPALS OR BOTH SEPALS AND PETALS. James G. Harris and Melinda Woolf Harris, Plant Identification Terminology: An Illustrated Glossary From the winter of 1996 through late spring of 1997, I was consumed by cherries. It was a pleasant occupation, but not easy to explain. Which cherries, exactly, people would ask? The ‘‘three graces,’’ I would answer: one is esteemed for the character of her wood, the second for the flavor of her fruit, and the third for the evanescent beauty of her blossoms. Or, ‘‘the glory of three continents.’’ The wood is from our native wild black cherry (Prunus serotina), the fruit derives from the European sweet and sour cherry species (Prunus avium and Prunus cerasus, respectively), and the much-admired blooms that now adorn our nation’s capital each spring are borne on the limbs of the Japanese flowering cherries (Prunus serrulata, P. yedoensis, P. subhirtella, and P. incisa, to name a few of the flowering cherry species). I said this silently. It was too soon, then, to speak aloud of grace and glory. But I could have said, ‘‘the rose family,’’ since cherries, like apples, pears, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, and our garden roses are all part of the same botanical family, Rosaceae, though not the same genus. Rosaceae, in fact, includes ‘‘about 115 genera [and] perhaps 3,200 species . . . in which are some of the major ornamental and pomological plants.’’1 Prunus, for example, is the genus for cherries, Malus for apples, Pyrus for pears, Fragaria for strawberries, and Rosa for roses. The Prunus genus in turn ‘‘comprises 400 species growing naturally in the Northern Hemisphere. It is the genus,’’ U.S. National Arboretum former director Henry M. Cathey goes on to say, ‘‘in which all of our stone fruits are found—almonds, apricots, cherries, nectarines, peaches, and plums.’’2 It is also the genus of our three cherries—as I did say, the American wood, the European fruit, and the Japanese flowers—exemplars of the agriculturally defined landscape of forest, orchard, and garden. I like their reach and the way they touch upon so many ways of knowing trees: the ways of craftsmen, botanists, planters and consumers of food, and spinners 14. François A. Michaux, The North American Sylva, vol. 2. (American Philosophical Society) of stories, to, finally, the creators of and the pilgrims to a place of meaningladen beauty—Washington’s cherry trees. The last had interested me first. But wanting to know about the one reminded me how little I knew about the others. In that way one grew to three, as growing things do, so before setting off for Washington, I tried to learn about them all, beginning where America began, with our wild black cherry. I first went to Paul Downs Cabinetmakers, where every day is cherry day. The Philadelphia furniture maker explains the popularity of this ‘‘wood of the moment’’3 in generational terms. He believes his clients have chosen the warm mid-range color (that ripens with age) of our native American wild black cherry as a middle ground between the light-colored oak and ash of their parents’ modern furniture and the dark mahogany of their grandparents’. Reaching back many more generations, they have chosen the wood of one of the cherries planted by George Washington at his Mount Vernon estate (Washington also planted sour cherries, Prunus cerasus ) and admired by General Lafayette, who asked that seeds of the tree be sent to him. Downs’s clients have chosen well. In his autobiographical The Soul of a Tree, the internationally renowned nisei woodworker George Nakashima writes that ‘‘cherry and other fruitwoods produce material of great quality. . . . All woods have graining—patterns created by the trunk fibers. However, the grain of many woods, pine and maple for instance, is regular and comparatively uninteresting, while that of walnut, cherry and other fruitwoods is intricate and exciting.’’4 Black cherry’s ‘‘satiny surface susceptible of receiving a beautiful polish ’’5 also makes it a favorite of woodworkers and cabinetmakers, as does its stability. Stability indicates less reaction to humidity than some other woods—meaning less shrinkage during seasoning and less warping after seasoning—so Downs says he is more confident shipping cherry furniture...