You know that Spring is well under way when you can spot cherry blossom by the roadsides. Once you can recognise the antenna like branches, festooned with pink or white flowers, you begin to realise how very common these trees are.
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| White Bloom on a Blue Sky |
The Cherry is a native tree, they grow wild in woodland and fields but they are also highly ornamental and are often planted to line roadsides, avenues and even supermarket car parks.
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| Close-Up of Cherry Flowers |
Some of the more decorative blooms will not later develop into useful fruit but a great many of these everyday trees will bear a huge crop of juicy dark red cherries.
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| A Cherry Blossom Vortex (perhaps) |
The thing that always surprises me, is that nearly all of these delicious beauties will be eaten by the birds; I rarely see other families out picking cherries locally even though they cost a fortune in the supermarket; we gathered bucket loads just in the St Deny’s area of Southampton last year.
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| Cherry Trees are Common, Even in the City |
Cherries ripen around June/July and many will be sweet enough to be eaten straight off the tree. Others will taste tart, so these will be better for cooking. After the huge success of my poached pears, I’m going to have a go at bottling some cherries this year. The benefit of this is being able to eat cherries with ice cream, out of season.
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| Antenna |
What we really need this year, is a local machine hire company to lend us a Powered Cherry Picker to drive us up into the branches of the larger trees, in order to relieve them of their ruby red jewels, this would enable us to beat the birds at their own game and stock up our kitchen cupboards.
It would also represent an interesting PR opportunity for a suitable machine hire company, so if any readers are employed in this field, I’m looking for suggestions and would like to stage some Cherry Picknik events this coming summer.
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| This Tree is in a Well-Known DIY Store Carpark |
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