cherrypop.xyz — The Pomologist's Quarterly

The Pomologist’s Quarterly · Privately Printed · MDCCCLXXXVII

Being a Quarterly Register of the Stone-Fruit, its Cultivation, Anatomy & Lore

Vol. I · No. III · the Society for the Study of Prunus

Plate the First · of the Wild Stock

Plate I — The Wild Stock

Among the hedgerows of the temperate latitudes there grows, unbidden and unbought, the mazzard — Prunus avium in its feral estate, ancestor of every sweet cherry that has since been coaxed onto a gentleman’s wall. We of the Society have walked the chalk downs at dawn to find it: a tree of no great stature, its bark ringed with horizontal lenticels like the rings of a spent candle, its blossom thrown out in a single reckless week before the leaf unfurls. It asks for nothing. It is, in the truest sense, the stock upon which all our refinements are merely a borrowed conceit.¹

The wild stock propagates with a peasant’s indifference to our intentions. A thrush swallows the drupe whole, the soft mesocarp is digested in the gut, and the stone — that small almond-shaped sarcophagus — is voided upon a fence-post or a tussock, scarified, stratified, and sown in one careless ablution. From such untidy beginnings come thickets, and from thickets, after a generation, a wood. The orchardist who imagines himself the author of the cherry would do well to remember that the bird wrote the first draft.

We append, as is our custom, a note upon the etymology. The word cerasus — whence our “cherry,” the French cerise, the German Kirsche — is held by Pliny to derive from the Pontic city of Cerasus, from which Lucullus is said to have carried the tree to Rome in the year 74 before the common era. The Society inclines, however, to the older view that both the place and the fruit took their name from a yet more ancient root signifying simply “horned” or “hooked” — a memory, perhaps, of the curved stalk by which the drupe depends.

Let it be set down that the wild stock, for all its rudeness, possesses three virtues no cultivated variety can boast in equal measure: a root-system that descends rather than spreads, and so anchors the graft against the gale; a constitution proof against the canker that fells the tender sorts; and a longevity that sees the planter into his grave and his grandson into his prime. The Society’s eldest member recalls a mazzard at Selborne, hollow as a chimney, that bore fruit in the seventieth year of his acquaintance with it. We do not improve upon such a tree. We merely lean against it.

¹ The reader will observe that we say avium — “of the birds” — and not domestica. The distinction is the whole of pomology in two words.

Prunus avium sylvestris — the mazzard in third leaf, with hedgerow habit, root, and bloom-knot.

XXIII

Plate the Second · of the Bud-Union

Plate II — Grafting & Bud Union

The art of grafting is the one truly Promethean act left to the gardener: the deliberate marriage of two lives that nature never intended to meet, conducted with a clean blade, a length of waxed bast, and a faith bordering on the theological. We take the wild stock — rude, rooted, immortal — and we open it with a single oblique cut; into that wound we lay a scion of Bigarreau or Morello, cambium pressed to cambium, and we bind the union and pray for the sap to rise. If the planets are kind, the two grow as one, the stock surrendering its vigour and the scion its character, and in three summers a cherry is born that no seed could ever have produced.

Of the several methods the Society has tried, we hold the whip-and-tongue superior for the wand-thin material of spring, and the shield-bud — a single eye lifted on a sliver of bark and slipped beneath a T-shaped incision — superior for the dog-days of July, when the bark “lifts” freely from the wood. The crown-graft we reserve for the renovation of an old standard whose head has grown cankerous and sour; the cleft-graft we have all but abandoned, as it admits the weather and breeds decay. In every case the cardinal rule is the same: the bud or scion must be of the past season’s growth, dormant, and cut with a stroke so true the surface might be polished glass.

It must be confessed that grafting is also an act of profound humility. The orchardist contributes nothing of his own substance; he is merely the marriage-broker, the scribe who copies a text he did not write. The vigour is the stock’s; the sweetness is the scion’s; the union, if it takes, is the slow work of the cambial cells themselves, knitting in the dark while we sleep. We have seen a thousand grafts fail for a hair’s breadth of misalignment, and a thousand take in spite of our clumsiness. The lesson is always the same, and we never quite learn it.

A digression upon the word: graft comes by way of the Old French grafe from the Greek graphein, to write — the same root that gives us “graphite” and “biography” — because the slender scion was thought to resemble a stylus, the pointed instrument with which the ancients incised wax tablets. Thus to graft a tree is, quite literally, to write upon it. We of the Society find this etymology so apt that we have adopted a graced quill crossed with a budding-knife as our private device, and stamp it, in this gold ink, upon the colophon of every number.

² The waxed bast should be of the lime, Tilia, soaked a week and beaten supple. Worsted will serve in extremity; jute never.

Insitio — the whip-and-tongue union bound in lime-bast; detail at right, the meeting of the cambial layers.²

XXXVII

Plate the Third · the Drupe Anatomised

Plate III — The Drupe in Section

Let us now cut the cherry open, as the anatomist cuts the cadaver, and read its construction from the skin inward. The fruit is a drupe — that botanical term of art for a fleshy body enclosing a single hard-walled seed — and it is built in three concentric coats, each with its proper name and its proper office. Outermost lies the epicarp, the lustrous skin, scarcely a cell or two in thickness, whose pigment ranges from the pale amber of a white-heart to the near-black of a Morello in full ripeness. Beneath it swells the mesocarp, the flesh proper, the part the bird and the schoolboy covet, gorged with sugar and a thin acid that the Society’s chemist measures with his refractometer each August.

Within the flesh, hard as a knuckle-bone, sits the endocarp — the stone, the “pit,” a lignified vault that no jaw should attempt and that the careless diner has been known to crack a molar upon. It is almond-shaped, faintly keeled along one suture, pitted and grooved like the surface of a walnut, and it exists for one purpose only: to ferry the true seed — the soft, oily, bitter kernel within — safely through the digestive tract of whatever creature swallows the fruit. The stone is the cherry’s ark; the kernel is its Noah. Everything else — skin, flesh, the very colour and sweetness we prize — is mere bribery, an inducement offered to the carrier.

The Society has examined, under the lens, the manner in which the three coats are bound. The epicarp is so thin it is best regarded as a cuticle of the mesocarp rather than a true layer. The mesocarp is composed of large, thin-walled, sap-distended cells, and it is the rupture of these — in a sudden downpour upon a ripe crop — that causes the calamity known as “splitting,” whereby a fortnight’s expectation is lost in a single thundery afternoon. The endocarp begins life soft and green, indistinguishable from the flesh, and only in the fruit’s last fortnight does it lignify, hardening from the suture outward in a process the Society finds among the most beautiful in all pomology.

One further note, upon the kernel. It contains, like the kernels of its cousins the apricot and the bitter almond, a small quantity of amygdalin, which on crushing yields prussic acid — whence the bitter taste, and whence the old wives’ injunction never to swallow the “pip.” In the quantities a careless child might ingest, the danger is slight; but the Society records, for completeness, that the distilled water of cherry-kernels was once a fashionable flavouring, and that more than one Georgian confectioner is said to have hastened a customer to the churchyard with an over-generous ratafia.

³ Drupa, Lat., an over-ripe olive; ult. from Gk. dryppa, of the same. The cherry and the olive are, anatomically, the same idea twice told.

Sectio drupae — the cherry whole and bisected: epicarp, mesocarp, lignified endocarp, and the oily kernel within.³

Plate the Fourth · of Pollination

Plate IV — Pollination by Wing & Wind

No cherry sets its fruit alone. The sweet sorts are, with scarce an exception, self-sterile — a flower’s own pollen falling upon its own stigma will not quicken — and so the orchardist must play the matchmaker a second time, planting his Bigarreau within bee-flight of a compatible Mayduke, lest he harvest nothing but a snowfall of barren blossom. The Society maintains a chart, much corrected, of which varieties will and will not fertilise which; it resembles nothing so much as a table of dynastic marriages, complete with forbidden degrees, and we consult it before every new planting as a herald consults the peerage.

The agent of this fertilisation is, in nine cases of ten, the honey-bee — Apis mellifera — though the early date of cherry-bloom, when the hive is still half-torpid and the weather treacherous, means the solitary bees and the hover-flies do more than their share. We have watched, glass in hand, a single Andrena work a whole panicle in the time it takes a honey-bee to decide the morning is too cold for commerce. The Society’s recommendation is therefore heterodox: leave a rough bank, a south-facing crumble of bare earth, somewhere near the orchard, that the mining-bees may have their nurseries close to their work.

Wind plays a part, but a smaller one than the layman supposes. Cherry pollen is heavy, sticky, and clumped — built for transport on a hairy thorax, not for broadcast on a breeze — and a gale at blossom-time is an unmitigated calamity, stripping the petals before the bee can board them and desiccating the stigma to a uselessness no later sunshine can repair. The ideal pollinating weather, the Society has concluded after thirty seasons of grumbling, is a still, soft, slightly humid noon at sixteen degrees of the Centigrade scale — which is to say, the weather England provides about one April in five.

A word, finally, upon the flower itself, that the engraving opposite may be the better read. The cherry blossom is “perfect” — it carries both stamens and pistil — borne in a corymb of three to six on a common peduncle, each flower of five white petals (rarely the faintest pink), some twenty to thirty stamens in a golden palisade, and a single central style descending to an inferior ovary that, fertilised, will be the drupe. The whole apparatus lasts, in fair weather, perhaps four days; in foul, a single afternoon. Upon those few hours the entire year’s harvest, and not a little of the Society’s peace of mind, depends.

⁴ The Morello and a few of the Dukes are honourably self-fertile, and may be planted in solitary state — a fact for which the cottager, with room for but one tree, has cause to be grateful.

Apis mellifera at the corymb of P. avium; inset, a pollen-grain magnified four hundred diameters.⁴

LXIX

Plate the Fifth · a Calendar of Bloom

Plate V — A Calendar of Bloom

The cherry keeps a calendar of its own, indifferent to the parish almanac, and the prudent pomologist learns to read it. From the swelling of the bud in the last grey week of March, through the “white bud” stage when the petals show but have not opened, to “full bloom” — that brief incandescence of the first warm fortnight of April — and on to “petal-fall,” when the orchard floor lies as if after a freak snow: the whole pageant occupies perhaps three weeks, and frost may abridge it to one. The Society has kept, for forty-one seasons, a register of these dates against the variety, the aspect, and the soil; we reproduce a portion opposite, that the reader may calibrate his own expectations.

The early sorts — the Early Rivers, the May Duke — are the gamblers of the orchard: they bloom while the swallow is still over Africa, and a single hard night at the end of April will black their stigmas and forfeit the year. The late sorts — the Late Duke, the Morello against a north wall — are the cautious annuitants, opening their flowers a clear fortnight after, when the frosts have, with luck, exhausted their malice. Between these poles the orchardist arranges his planting as a careful investor spreads his funds, that no single April night may ruin him entire.

There is, the Society would note, a particular cruelty in the cherry’s precocity. The blossom is the most beautiful thing the tree will do all year — the fruit, for all its sweetness, is a coarser pleasure — and it is offered up earliest, most lavishly, and most defencelessly, before a single leaf has unfurled to shelter it. The Japanese, who understand these things, have made of the cherry’s bloom a national meditation upon transience; the English, more prosaic, have made of it a source of annual anxiety and a reliable subject for the correspondence columns. The Society inclines, as ever, to the middle way: we admire the snow of the petals, and we keep the smudge-pots filled.

We close this section with an injunction to the planter: visit your orchard at first light during the bloom. Not for any practical purpose — there is nothing to be done — but because the sight of a cherry-walk in full flower at dawn, the dew not yet off, the first bees only beginning their drowsy commerce, the whole white architecture of it suspended for a few hours between the bud and the wreck, is one of the legitimate rewards of the pomologist’s otherwise thankless calling. The fruit you may sell; this you may only witness. Witness it.

⁵ The Society’s register, in twelve manuscript volumes, is available to Members at the customary hour. Bring your own ink; ours runs low.

Kalendarium florum — the wheel of bloom: forty-one seasons reduced; the lit arc is April’s incandescence.⁵

XCI

Colophon

This number was set by hand in Cormorant and EB Garamond upon a screen of liquid glass, and stamped, where the eye perceives gold, in the dim antique gilded-rule of the Society’s press. The vector plates were drawn afresh from specimens in the Society’s own orchard; no engraving herein has appeared in any prior number. The masthead’s nine glyphs were dropped, each from its own compositor’s stick, and permitted to settle where the spring of the cubic-bezier let them lie — which is to say, never twice the same.

Printed for private circulation among the Members of the Society for the Study of Prunus. The text is the work of many hands and longer evenings; errors are the editor’s, and corrections may be lodged in the usual book. The cherry-stone watermark in the corner of each spread has turned, you will have noticed, one degree per leaf — ninety-one folios, six degrees of rotation, a slow and deliberate revolution, like the year itself.

Here ends The Pomologist’s Quarterly, Vol. I, No. III. The reader is invited to return to the frontispiece and begin again; the cherry, after all, is an annual, and so is the wonder of it.

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