Cherry picking

You know for sure that spring is here when the blossom arrives and, almost by default, and yourself looking up and looking forward. The Japanese are expert at celebrating this moment and organise whole festivals around single cherry trees in full ?ower. Parks are planted to capitalise on the cherry-blossom season and every morning, to accompany the television news, weather maps indicate the "cherryblossom front" as it moves from the warm south to the colder north, so that ?ower-viewing picnics (hanami) can be planned under the trees.

Although we do not go to such lengths here, I think blossom of any kind makes you feel like celebrating, so I always try to include a ?owering tree in my planting schemes to mark this change of season.

At the beginning of April, I spent my birthday weekend at a client's garden south of Rome, and witnessed the most perfect blossom moment in several groves of cherries that we planted there. We have tried to stagger the ?owering so that one variety hands over to the next and, when I arrived, Prunus 'Accolade' was at its zenith. One tree was planted before I started work here a decade ago and must now be 15 years old, spreading low and wide. It was surrounded by a selection of other cherries, but was so much the superior plant that they were removed and we are currently adding to this specimen with young P. ‘Accolade' to form a grove. I usually prefer white cherries to pink, but 'Accolade' is a good clean pink and not in the least saccharine. Visit telegraph.co.uk for detail.

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In praise of black cherry

The black cherry, or prunus serotina, is a weed that grows from Ontario to Florida in the Eastern part of North America. At maturity, it's a 60-foot-tall weed, but a useful one. If you had to choose one tree to make birds happy, this is it.

The black cherry is scraggly in shape, but fruitful. The flowers, dull white and droopy, give rise to enormous quantities of small black cherries, inedible for us but a great source of bird food. The seeds go through the birds, plop onto the ground with a dollop of bird-supplied fertilizer, and produce a gazillion seedlings. In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin points out the tree's evolutionary genius: "That a ripe strawberry or cherry is pleasing to the eye as to the palate will be admitted by everyone. But this beauty serves merely as a guide to birds and beasts, in order that the fruit may be devoured and the matured seeds disseminated." Visit slate.com for more.

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In The Pink

The cherry blossoms along the Cherry Walk and Cherry Esplanade at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden are at peak and this weekend is the Garden's Sakura Matsuri, or Cherry Blossom Festival. The weather should be perfect for blossom viewing.

A big old high pressure system is sitting on top of us, blocking the low pressure system that may cause severe weather in Oklahoma and Texas from getting here. Not a cloud in the sky. High temperatures in the lower- to mid-60s. We know what Gothamist will be doing this weekend. Uh, backing up our computer's hard drive. But our dull life shouldn't stop you from enjoying the pretty flowers. Because the air is quite dry, dewpoints are in the 20s, it'll get quite chilly at night. Clouds, and a ever-so-slight chance of rain, creep into the forecast by Monday.

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Cherry

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A cherry (originally "cherise" reinterpreted as a plural, from the Old French word, in turn from Latin cerasum and Cerasus - i.e., the Classical name of the modern city of Giresun in Turkey) is both a tree and its fleshy fruit, a type known as a drupe with a single hard stone enclosing the seed. The cherry belongs to the family Rosaceae, genus Prunus (along with almonds, peaches, plums, apricots and bird cherries). The cherries belong in subgenus Cerasus, distinguished from the rest of the genus by having the flowers in small corymbs of several together (not singly, nor in racemes), and in the fruit being smooth and not having a groove along one side. The subgenus is native to the temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere, with two species in North America, three in Europe, and the remainder in Asia.

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