THE BLACK CHERRY.
The Black Cherry, which is a tree of the first magnitude in favorable regions, is only a middle-sized tree in the New England States. In the South and West, especially on the banks of the Ohio River, it attains a very great size, rising sometimes to one hundred feet, according to Michaux, with a corresponding diameter. It is sensitive to the extremes both of cold and heat, and to an excess either of dryness or moisture. In Maine it is only a small tree, being checked in its growth by the severe Northern winters. Very far south it suffers from the hot and dry summers, but prospers well in the mountainous parts. It forms immense forests in many districts of North America, in company with the honey locust, the black walnut, the red elm, and the oak. It is sufficiently common in New England to constitute an important ingredient of our wood scenery, and though indigenous, it is most abundant in lands which have been modified by cultivation.
This tree differs very obviously in its ramification from the garden cherry, in which the branches are always subordinate to the trunk, and arranged in irregular whorls and stages, one above another, so that, if they were horizontal, they would resemble those of a fir-tree. The Black Cherry tree, on the contrary, is subdivided in such a manner that the main stem cannot easily be traced above the lower junction of the branches, except in those which have grown in a forest. The branches are spread out more loosely, without the least of any arrangement in whorls, and their terminations are longer and smaller. The leaves of the two trees are also widely different: those of the garden cherry are broad, ovate, rough, and serrate; those of the American tree are lanceolate and smooth, and almost as slender as the leaves of the willow. The one bears its flowers and fruit in racemes, the other in round clusters or umbels. The trunk and bark of the two species are similar, both resembling the black birch in the properties of their wood and the outside appearance of their bark. The branches of the Wild Cherry are too straggling and sparse to make a beautiful tree, and the leaves being small and narrow, the whole mass is wanting in depth of shade.