THE ANCIENT USE OF CHERRIES
History casts no direct light upon the period when the cherry first came under cultivation. Undoubtedly primitive men in all parts of the North Temperate Zone enlivened their scanty fruit fare with wild cherries. Cultivated cherries, we know, had their origin in the Old World. But history tells us nothing of the period when Europe and Asia were unbroken forests inhabitated by savages who eked out a precarious subsistence by the pursuit of the chase and from meagre harvests of wild grains, fruits and vegetables. On these continents agriculture and rude civilization began in ages immemorial and cultivated plants diversified, enriched and adorned the landscapes long before the first written records. Our knowledge of how wild cherries have been remodeled into the orchard and garden varieties of today—of what the methods and processes of domestication have been—is, therefore, doubtful and limited, for the mind and hand of man had been deeply impressed upon the cherry long before the faint traditions which have been transmitted to our day could possibly have arisen.
The history of the cherry, then, goes back to primitive man. Direct proof of the ancient use of cherries is furnished by the finding of cherry-pits of several species in the deposits of Swiss lake-dwellings, in the mounds and cliff-caves of prehistoric inhabitants of America and in the ancient rubbish-heaps of Scandinavian countries. There are but few regions in which cultivated cherries are grown in which the inhabitants in times of stress, or by choice in times of plenty, do not now use as food wild cherries, some species of which grow in abundance and under the most varied conditions, almost from the Arctic Circle to within a few degrees of the Tropic of Cancer in a belt encircling the globe. It is probable that all of the wild species which have furnished fruit to the aborigines or to the modern inhabitants of a region have been sparingly cultivated—at the very least if they possessed any considerable food value they have been more or less widely distributed by the hand of man. But, curiously enough, out of the score or more of species of which the fruit is used as food as the plants grow wild, but two may be said to be truly domesticated. These are the Sour, or Pie Cherry, Prunus cerasus, and the Sweet Cherry, Prunus avium, with the histories of which we are now to be concerned.
Pliny 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 Lucullus, the Roman soldier and gourmet, had brought them to Rome 65 years before Christ[12] from the region of the Black Sea. This particular in the account proves to be a good illustration 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.