The cherries of New York

by U. P. Hedrick

THE CHERRY IN GREECE; THE FIRST RECORD OF CULTURE AND THE NAME

Having established the habitats of the two cultivated cherries we may next ask when and where their cultivation began. The domestication of plants probably began in China—certainly Chinese agriculture long antedates that of any other nation now in existence of which we have records. Agriculture in China, historians roughly approximate, goes back 4,000 years. But while the Chinese have many other species of cherry, as we have seen, some of which may be said to be partially domesticated, Prunus cerasus and Prunus avium are not found wild in China and were only in recent years introduced there as cultivated plants. Neither does the cherry of our civilization seem to have been known in the second great agricultural region of the world—Egypt and the extreme southwest of Asia. At least there are no words for the cherry in the languages of the peoples of that region and cherry pits have not been found with the remains of other plants in the tombs and ruins of Egypt, Assyria and Babylon. Nor does the cherry seem to have been cultivated in India until comparatively recent times.

These very brief and general statements show that cherries were not cultivated in the first agricultural civilizations and serve to fix the time and the place of the domestication of the cherry a little more definitely. Records of cherries as cultivated plants begin, so far as the researches of botanical historians now show, with Greek civilization though it is probable, for several reasons, that some cultivated cherries came to Greece from Asia Minor.

Theophrastus, to whom Linnaeus gave the title "Father of Botany," writing about 300 years before the Christian era in his History of Plants, is, according to botanical historians, the first of the Greek writers to mention the cherry. His statement is as follows:—

"The cherry is a peculiar tree, of large size, some attaining the height of twenty-four cubits, rather thick, so that they may measure two cubits in circumference at the base. The leaf is like that of the mespilus, rather firm and broader, the color of the foliage such that the tree may be distinguished from others at a good distance. The bark, by its color, smoothness and thickness, is like that of tilia. The flower [meaning, the cluster of flowers] is white, resembling that of the pear and mespilus, consisting of small [separate] flowers. The fruit is red, similar to that of diospyros [but what his diospyros was no one knows] of the size of a faba [perhaps nelumbo seed], which is hard, but the cherry is soft. The tree grows in the same situations as tilia; by streams."[14]

From this passage we gather that the cherry Theophrastus knew was the Sweet Cherry, Prunus avium; the description shows it to be the same large, tall tree now naturalized in open woods and along roadsides in many parts of the United States. From the fact that Theophrastus describes the tree and the bark in more detail than the fruit we may assume that the cherry was more esteemed in ancient Greece as a timber-tree than as a fruit-tree. Curiously enough the name the Greeks at this time used for the Sweet Cherry is now applied to Prunus cerasus, the Sour Cherry.

"Kerasos" was the Sweet Cherry in ancient Greece and from kerasos came cerasus, used by many botanists as the name of the genus. That the Sweet Cherry should by the use of avium be denominated the "bird cherry" is clear since birds show much discrimination between cherries, but why the Sour Cherry should be given the specific name cerasus, first applied to the Sweet Cherry, is not apparent.

Pages are written in the old pomologies and botanical histories as to the origin of the word cerasus. Pliny's statement that Lucullus called the cherry cerasus from the town from which he obtained it, Kerasun in Pontus, on the Black Sea, is, in the light of all who have since looked into the matter, a misconception. To the contrary, commentators now agree that the town received its name from the cherry which grows most abundantly in the forests in that part of Asia Minor. The name, according to all authorities, is very ancient—a linguistic proof of the antiquity of the cherry.

To sum up, the cherry comes into literature first from Greece in the writings of Theophrastus. There can be but little doubt, however, but that it had been cultivated for centuries before Theophrastus wrote. Whether one or both of the two cherries were domesticated by the Greeks, beginning with their civilization, or whether cultivated cherries came to Greece from Asia Minor, is not now known. It is very probable that some of the several varieties grown in Greece came under cultivation through domestication of wild plants; others were introduced from regions farther east.