With kind permission of Christopher Stocks from his book Forgotten Fruits - A guide to Britain's traditional fruit and vegetables.
'Not many would claim that swedes, say, are as beautiful as they are delicious, but there are few more uplifting sights than a cherry tree in flower. A. E. Housman certainly knew a thing or two about cherries, having been born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, whose nineteenth-century prosperity was founded on the historically unusual combination of fruit-growing and the manufacture of nails. As recently as 1964 James Lees-Milne could observe that ‘orchards practically surround the town up to its edge’, but their days were numbered even then, victims of cheaper foreign imports. It’s been estimated that in 1951 there were around 7000 hectares (18,000 acres) of cherry orchards in the UK; by 2003 that figure had plummeted to a paltry 381 hectares (943 acres). Today over 90 per cent of our cherries are imported from abroad, either by road from Turkey, or by air from the west coast of the USA.
'Their decline has been put down to a single factor: size. Sweet cherries are unruly, vigorous trees, and can grow over fifteen metres (fifty feet high) – one of the reasons they were often fan-trained against walls, where they could be kept under some kind of control. In open orchards the fruit had to be picked using long, heavy wooden ladders that took two men to carry. It was dangerous and exacting work, not least because it was easy to damage the following season’s flower buds, which are hidden beside the cherry stalks. Pickers were sometimes sacked on the spot just for knocking off a few leaves.
'Cherries have been a favourite fruit since time out of mind. Wild cherries are found all over Europe. In Britain and Western Europe these were mostly the native bird-cherry, Prunus avium, so called for the fairly obvious reason that birds will, given half a chance, quickly strip their fruit. These trees are the ancestors of the sweet cherries we eat today, although their fruit is nothing to write home about. The sour cherries used in cooking are offspring of a different species entirely, Prunus cerasus (which itself may be a hybrid between Prunus avium and Prunus fruticosa, the so-called ground cherry). The origins of Prunus cerasus are further east, a clue being hidden in its name: Cerasus was a settlement on the Black Sea coast (now the Turkish town of Giresun) which was famous for its cherries even in the time of ancient Greece.
'Cultivated cherries – both sweet and sour – were probably brought to Britain, like so much else, by the Romans, and they were widely grown by the Middle Ages, both in monastic and private gardens. Morello cherries (a cultivated form of Prunus cerasus) most likely came to Britain via Moorish southern Spain, as their name suggests – Morello supposedly meaning ‘Little Moor’. Kent was at the centre of British cherry growing from the start, partly because of its propinquity to London but also because it offered the well-drained, sandy soil that cherry trees prefer. According to one account, the genesis of the Kentish orchards can be dated to 1533, when they was kick-started by a kind of sixteenth-century Johnny Appleseed. In his Perambulation of Kent: Conteining the Description, Historie, and Customes of that Shyre, published just forty years later in 1576, the historian William Lambarde claimed that Richard Harris, who held the title of royal fruiterer to Henry VIII, planted the first orchards of apples, cherries and other fruit trees around Teynham on the instructions of the King. If the seventeenth-century diarist John Evelyn is to be believed, Harris went on to plant orchards round a further thirty Kent towns. Despite their evident popularity and Harris’s pioneering efforts, most new varieties of cherries continued to be imported from the continent, at least until the mid-seventeenth century, when some unknown but imaginative orchardist had the bright idea of crossing sweet cherries with the sour Morello kind. The sweet-sour hybrids that resulted became known in Britain as Dukes, though the French called them Anglais in recognition of their origins.
'Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century cherry cultivation is dominated by one man: Thomas Andrew Knight, a shy, rich but far from idle squire who lived at Elton Hall, near Ludlow in Herefordshire, from his marriage in 1791 until 1809, the year in which his brother gave him Downton Castle and its 10,000 estate. One of the founders, and later president of what was to become the Royal Horticultural Society, Knight has been called the father of horticultural science. His interests in hybridisation were intensely practical, and his experiments – many of them assisted by his teenage daughters – led to many new varieties of strawberries, apples, plums and cherries, including Knight’s Early Black, the magnificent Elton Heart, and the delicious Waterloo. Seven of Knight’s original trees were found still growing in the orchard at Elton Hall in 1926, and some may even survive today.
'Thanks to the efforts of Knight and the hard work of talented nurserymen like Thomas Rivers, the late nineteenth century saw the high point of cherry cultivation, with orchards established wherever suitable conditions could be found. Some were so extensive that they became tourist attractions in their own right. By the early twentieth century the fame of the orchards along the River Tamar in Cornwall was such that, each spring, special boats would ferry tourists up the river from Plymouth to admire the sight of the cherries in bloom. But their days were already numbered, and their decline – precipitated by the shortage of manpower in the Second World War, and continued by the rise of foreign imports – was as dramatic as it was sustained.
'Yet there are hopeful signs for the future. Commercial cherry orchards are being planted again, though largely with smaller trees. Their size once made many varieties of cherry impractical for all but the biggest gardens too, but modern dwarfing rootstocks such as Colt and G5 can limit their height to a manageable three to six metres (ten to twenty feet) – a fairly acceptable height for an average-sized plot. Given the popularity of those blowsy but barren so-called ‘ornamental’ varieties, perhaps we can look forward to a time when, once again, cherries are grown for their fruit as well as their flowers, just as they were in A. E. Housman’s day.
'Two final words of warning. Most cherries aren’t self-fertile, and their nomenclature is a mess. To make sure you get fruit it’s generally necessary to plant two compatible varieties, thus ensuring pollination (I’ve suggested suitable pollinators for each variety below). The name game is rather more problematic. Over the years the same varieties have been called different names in different areas, with the result that some apparently distinct varieties turn out to be identical. Much work has been done to sort this out, but it still makes sense to buy from a specialist nursery which really knows its stock.'
