Notice Black Cherry in your daily travels when you see their long, drooping, fragrant spring flowers or their distinctive reddish smooth wood in fine furniture or the bark of older trees which resembles burnt potato chips or, on younger trees, shiny with wide horizontal lines or lenticels, though which Black Cherry exchanges breath with all around them. Its often one of the first trees to enter a disturbed area, making it a marker of transformation, letting us know the history of a place by its very presence.  Black Cherry is spread by birds, which also makes evident to us their avian highways.  Shade intolerant, drought tolerant, fast growing, frost susceptible, and native to Eastern North America, Black Cherry is a beloved friend, neighbor, and community member.

Black Cherry shares lavishly with a dizzying range of beings in their neighborhood.  Scientists call them a keystone species, a term that describes their outsize effect on the abundance and diversity of other species. Their fruit is eaten by many mammals, including black bears, wild turkeys, Spotted Skunks, Eastern Gray Fox, and even Eastern Box Turtles.  Song, passerine, and game birds such as American Robins, Northern Cardinals, Hermit Thrush, Song Sparrows, and European Starlings thrive on the highly nutritious fruits and in exchange for their dinner, they disperse the seeds widely.  Hundreds of insects rely on Black Cherry for food and, in some cases, shelter, such as ants, native beetles, spiders, wasps, finger galls.  These insects become unsuspecting pollination partners, as they transport some of the pollen from Black Cherry’s long drooping flowers to other Black Cherries.  Over 456 species of butterflies and moths feed on the leaves of Black Cherry when they are caterpillars.  This dazzling complexity of relationships enhances and preserves the entire ecosystem.  Every being is kin to each other and without these connections the entire web of life diminishes.  Black Cherry models for us a generous and generative care and support for the great “assembly of beings” as Gary Snyder called it.