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Prunus serotina Ehrh. Black cherry

Flowers borne in racemes

Habitat

Black cherry occurs mostly on lower slopes where soils are rich and well drained, or on alluvial soils in river valleys. It is commonly mixed with species such as white ash, basswood, yellow birch, sugar maple, beech, red oak, and white spruce. It prefers more open conditions because it is shade intolerant.

Tree at the blooming stage

Form

Black cherry is a tree that can grow to heights of up to 23 m, and to stem diameters of up to 60 cm. Its stems are frequently somewhat sinuous. The crowns are narrow, oblong or rounded, and made up of slender arching branches with drooping tips.

Morphology

The leaves are deciduous, simple, short stalked, and borne alternately (in a single spiral) along the shoots. Each leaf is 5–18 cm long, narrowly oval to lanceolate, and tapered to a sharp point. The margins have many, fine, forwardly pointing and inwardly curving teeth. The underside of each leaf is distinctive in that there are mats of white to rusty-brown hair along either side of the basal part of the midvein.

Developing fruits

The twigs are reddish brown with many reddish-brown ovoid but blunt-tipped lateral buds with dark-edged overlapping bud scales, and a similar terminal bud. Sometimes one or more lateral buds may be quite close to the terminal one. The twigs have a bitter-almond taste. 

The five-petalled, white flowers occur in hanging clusters of many short-stalked flowers borne along a central stem (in racemes) at the ends of new, leafy shoots. Some of the flowers in each cluster go on to form fruits. The fruits, which are small, bitter cherries, 8–12 mm across, change from green through pinkish orange to red, and then to black as they ripen.

Bark of stem, 22 cm in diameter

The bark is smooth and dark reddish brown to black with greyish horizontal flecks when young. As the bark ages it breaks into irregularly rectangular, dark greyish, horizontally marked plates that tend to curve outwards at their upper and lower ends.

Notes

Black cherry wood is hard, semi ring porous, strong, attractively grained, and light to dark reddish brown. It is valued for furniture and specialty products.

Ripening fruit

The fruits are excellent for jams and jellies, and extracts are used as flavoring in candies, lozenges, and soft drinks.

Black cherry, especially when it bears flowers or fruits, may be confused with choke cherry (Prunus virginiana L.) because its flowers are also borne in racemes, and it can bear similar black fruits (also red, or yellow fruits). However, choke cherry fruits have only tiny remnants of the flower parts at their bases, whereas those of black cherry have far more distinct and larger flower remnants. Choke cherry leaves are also smaller, broader for their size, broader above the middle, and more finely and more sharply toothed around the margins. They are hairless along the midveins below. Choke cherry is a multistemmed shrub species, and only rarely a small tree. It emits a much stronger bitter- almond odor when its twigs are bruised or broken.