How does black cherry care for us?

Notice Black Cherry in your daily travels when you see their long, drooping, fragrant spring flowers; their distinctive reddish smooth wood in fine furniture; or the bark of older trees that 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. They are often one of the first trees to enter a disturbed area, making them a harbinger of transformation, letting us know the history of a place by its very presence.  Black Cherry is spread by birds, which also makes evident the avian highways all around us.  Shade intolerant, drought resilient, 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: animals, insects, butterflies and moths, and so much more.  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.