Cherries are named after a Black Sea town and reached England via Henry VIII
The word cherry traces to Kerasous, near modern Giresun in Turkey, once thought to be where Europe got its first cherries. A Roman general carried a cultivated tree to Rome in 72 BCE. Centuries later Henry VIII tasted cherries in Flanders and ordered orchards planted in Kent.
Cherries are stone fruits from many plants of the genus Prunus. Most cultivated varieties are sweet cherries, Prunus avium, while sour cherries, Prunus cerasus, are grown mainly for cooking; both come from Europe and western Asia and rarely cross-pollinate. True cherries have one winter bud per leaf axil and smooth, ungrooved fruit. In East Asia, Chinese and downy cherries have been cultivated for thousands of years. Some unrelated fruits borrow the name, such as the Jamaican cherry.
Sweet cherries grew wild across Europe, western Asia and parts of North Africa and were eaten there since prehistory. Lucius Licinius Lucullus brought a cultivated form to Rome from the Pontus region of northeastern Anatolia in 72 BCE. In England, Henry VIII had orchards established at Teynham in Kent, and cherries probably reached North America around 1606 at Port Royal, now Annapolis Royal in Nova Scotia.
Growing them is demanding. Trees need a certain number of winter chilling hours to break dormancy, so no Prunus species can grow in the tropics. A new orchard tree takes three to four years to fruit and seven to mature, and rain, hail, irrigation and labour keep prices high. Dwarfing rootstocks such as the Gisela series keep trees to about 2.5 to 3 metres. Sour cherries need no pollinating partner, whereas few sweet varieties are self-fertile. Pests include the black cherry aphid, which curls leaf tips, and the cherry fruit fly, whose larvae feed inside the fruit.
In the Southern Hemisphere cherries peak in late December and are linked with Christmas. In 2020 the world grew 2.61 million tonnes of sweet cherries, 28 percent of them in Turkey, and 1.48 million tonnes of sour ones, led by Russia. Since 1932 growers around Céret in southern France have sent the season's first crate to the French president, and Traverse City, Michigan, calls itself the Cherry Capital of the World.
Source: Cherry
