Cherries: History and Origins

Table of Contents

1. Two Cherries, Not One
2. Stones in the Mud: The Prehistoric Record
3. The Name: From Kerasos to Cherry
4. Lucullus and the Roman Cherry
5. Charlemagne's Orchards and the Medieval Cherry
6. Henry VIII, Teynham and the Kentish Cherry
7. Across the Atlantic: Bing, Rainier and Montmorency
8. Sakura: The Cherry Grown for Its Blossom
9. The Maraschino Story
10. Pits, Cyanide and the Tart-Cherry Trials
11. Cherries Today
12. Key Research Papers
13. Connections
14. Featured Videos

Two Cherries, Not One

Almost every cherry you will ever eat belongs to one of two species, and they are not simply a sweet and a sour version of the same plant. The sweet cherry, Prunus avium, is a tall forest tree — in the wild it can reach the height of a house, with smooth bark that peels in horizontal bands. Its native range is enormous: from the British Isles and Norway's Trondheim fjord in the north, south to Morocco and Tunisia, and east across Anatolia and the Caucasus into northern Iran. In Britain the wild form is still called the gean or mazzard. It is a diploid, with two sets of eight chromosomes, and it cannot pollinate itself.

The sour cherry, Prunus cerasus, is a smaller, bushier tree with a very different pedigree. It carries thirty-two chromosomes, twice the sweet cherry's count, and botanists long suspected it was an allotetraploid — a hybrid between two species that then doubled its whole genome so that every chromosome had a partner and the plant became fertile. The suspected parents were the sweet cherry and the ground cherry, Prunus fruticosa, a knee-high tetraploid shrub of the eastern European and Siberian steppe. DNA-marker work by Tavaud and colleagues in 2004, across all three species and the intermediate "Duke" cherries (Prunus × gondouinii, sweet–sour hybrids), supported that origin. In 2023 a team led by Charity Goeckeritz assembled the 'Montmorency' genome and settled it: the sour cherry carries three distinct ancestral sub-genomes, one sweet-cherry-like and two ground-cherry-like, exactly what a stabilised hybrid should look like. No truly wild P. cerasus is known; the overlap of its parents' ranges, in eastern Europe and toward the Iranian plateau, is the best guess at where the cross happened.

The sweet cherry's own domestication is visible in its genome too. Reference genomes were published from Japan in 2017 (Shirasawa and colleagues) and Italy in 2020 (Pinosio and colleagues); the Italian study found that domestication left a genome-wide loss of diversity, as growers selected a few favoured trees, plus local signatures at particular genes. Compared with apples or wheat, though, cherries were domesticated lightly: a big sweet wild cherry already tasted like a cherry, and the main human contribution was choosing the best trees and learning to graft them so those exact trees could be copied.

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Stones in the Mud: The Prehistoric Record

Cherry stones survive burial well: hard, small, easy to identify, and recognisable for thousands of years once they fall into waterlogged mud. That is why the deepest history of the cherry comes from archaeobotany — the study of plant remains from excavations — rather than from any text.

The classic finds are from the pile dwellings around the Alpine lakes: Neolithic and Bronze Age villages built on stilts over the shallows of Swiss, German and northern Italian lakes, whose rubbish layers preserved seeds, stones and food scraps in oxygen-free sediment. Wild cherry stones appear in these deposits, and in Bronze Age lakeside settlements near Lake Garda in northern Italy, and in Irish crannogs (artificial island dwellings). The botanist Alphonse de Candolle used such finds in 1882 to argue that the cherry was a native European wild food long before it was a Roman luxury. These are the remains of gathered wild fruit, not orchards: the stones are wild-sized and nothing at the sites shows planting. But they establish the essential point. People across temperate Europe were eating cherries three and four thousand years ago, and a Roman general in 74 BCE cannot have been the first to bring the fruit to Italy.

The record has limits. A cherry stone tells you a cherry was eaten, not whether it was sweet or sour (the two species' stones are hard to separate) or whether the tree was tended, and many older finds are dated by their layer rather than directly. What can be said with confidence is that the wild sweet cherry was part of the European diet through the Neolithic and Bronze Age, and that cultivation — the deliberate planting and grafting of chosen trees — came much later and from the east.

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The Name: From Kerasos to Cherry

The word "cherry" is a small history lesson in itself. The Greeks called the tree kerasos. According to Robert Beekes's etymological dictionary of Greek, the word is a loanword of uncertain origin, probably Anatolian or pre-Greek — that is, borrowed from a language spoken in Asia Minor before the Greeks arrived. From Greek it passed into Latin as cerasus (the tree) and cerasum (the fruit), and from Latin into almost every European language: Turkish kiraz, Albanian qershi, German Kirsche, French cerise.

English took the word twice. Old English had ciris, borrowed early from Vulgar Latin along with other West Germanic languages, but that word died out after the Norman Conquest. It was replaced by the Old Northern French cherise — which Middle English speakers heard as a plural, "cherries", and duly stripped of its final s to make the singular chery. The same mistake gave us "pea" from pease.

Then there is the town. On the Black Sea coast of what is now Turkey stood the Greek colony of Kerasous (Latin Cerasus), today's Giresun, and the region of Pontus around it is where the Romans said their cherries came from. Which came first, the tree's name or the town's, has been argued for two thousand years; the cautious modern reading is that the town was named for its cherry trees and that the fruit's name is older and Anatolian, not the other way round.

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Lucullus and the Roman Cherry

The most repeated story in cherry history comes from Pliny the Elder, in Book 15 of his Natural History (written in the 70s CE). His Latin is worth quoting because the dates in the retellings drift: Cerasi ante victoriam Mithridaticam L. Luculli non fuere in Italia, ad urbis annum DCLXXX — "Before the Mithridatic victory of Lucius Lucullus there were no cherry trees in Italy, down to the year 680 of the city." The 680th year from Rome's traditional founding is 74 BCE in our reckoning (72 BCE is often quoted, from a different way of counting). Lucullus, Pliny says, first brought them from Pontus, and annisque CXX trans oceanum in Britanniam usque pervenere — "within 120 years they had crossed the ocean as far as Britain." He then lists eight varieties known in his day — the Apronian, the reddest; the Lutatian, the blackest; the Junian, of pleasant flavour; the firm-fleshed Plinian; and others down to a dwarf "ground-cherry" (chamaecerasus) grown as a shrub.

Lucullus was a real and very rich man, the general who fought Mithridates VI of Pontus and whose name became a byword for lavish dining. That he brought fine cherry trees back from the Black Sea is entirely plausible. That there were no cherries in Italy before him is not: the Bronze Age stones from Lake Garda are older by two thousand years, and the wild sweet cherry is native to Italy. Historians settle on the reading that what he introduced was a cultivated, large-fruited variety from a region where selection had gone further than in the west. His own list of eight named sorts within a century and a half of the "introduction" only makes sense if the Romans were already skilled at grafting, which they were.

Pliny's remark that cherries reached Britain within 120 years — by about the middle of the first century CE, the decade of the Roman conquest — fits the pattern archaeobotanists see across Roman Britain, where new and improved orchard fruits arrive with the legions and the towns. The wild gean was already native; what came with Rome was the grafted orchard cherry.

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Charlemagne's Orchards and the Medieval Cherry

After the western empire fell, the orchard cherry survived where orchards survived: in the gardens of monasteries and great estates. The clearest early medieval document is the Capitulare de villis, a set of instructions for the management of the royal estates issued by Charlemagne's court (its exact date is disputed; most historians place it between about 771 and 800, and a minority attribute it to his son Louis in Aquitaine). Its seventieth chapter lists the plants every royal estate should grow, and closes its list of trees with ceresarios diversi generis — "cherry trees of various kinds" — after apples, pears, plums, service trees, medlars, chestnuts, peaches, quinces, hazels, almonds, mulberries, laurels, pines, figs and walnuts. "Of various kinds" is the telling phrase: by around 800 the Frankish court expected more than one cherry variety to be available and worth planting.

Through the Middle Ages the cherry was one of the few fresh fruits of early summer, ripening in June and July when the previous autumn's stores were gone and the grain harvest still weeks away — a seasonal treat sold in bulk and eaten quickly, which is why it appears so often in medieval and early modern art as an image of brief pleasure. Sour cherries had a second life as preserve and medicine: dried agriots kept through the winter in French kitchens, cherry-tree gum was recommended for coughs, and crushed stones went into cordials. These are traditional uses, recorded because people practised them, not evidence that they worked.

Two cherry types that dominate the later record were already taking shape in this period. The Morello — a dark, deep-red sour cherry with coloured juice, the type still used for jam and cherry brandy — and the paler Amarelle group, with clear juice, of which the 'Montmorency' is the famous modern example. Between the sweet and sour species sat the Duke cherries, natural hybrids that combined some sweetness with the sour cherry's hardiness. (The name "Duke" is traditionally explained as a corruption of Médoc; that is a guess, not a documented fact.)

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Henry VIII, Teynham and the Kentish Cherry

England's cherry story has a precise starting point, at least as the Elizabethans told it. William Lambarde, whose Perambulation of Kent was completed around 1570 and printed in 1576, recorded that in 1533 a hundred and five acres of good ground at Teynham in north Kent were planted with fruit for the King by Richard Harris (or Harrys), fruiterer to Henry VIII, with cherry and apple trees brought from Flanders, where growers were then the acknowledged masters of orchard fruit. It is a good example of how to read such a "first": there were cherry trees in England long before 1533, but Harris's planting is the first documented commercial orchard of improved continental varieties, and it fixed north Kent as the country's cherry district for the next four centuries.

A century later the English had made the cherry their own. John Parkinson's great garden book Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris (1629), whose third part is an orchard manual, opens its cherry chapter by admitting there are "so many varieties and differences of cherries" that he hardly knows where to begin, then describes the English and the larger Flanders cherry, the early May cherry (warning that dishonest nurserymen sold the early Flanders as a May), the "Arch-Duke's cherry" as one of the fairest and best, the Gascoign, and the Morello, which the French dried as agriots. He notes that nurserymen grafted May cherries onto wild black-cherry stocks — a grafted tree being the only way to copy a good one exactly.

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Across the Atlantic: Bing, Rainier and Montmorency

The orchard cherry is not native to the Americas (the continent has its own wild Prunus, such as the chokecherry) and came with the earliest European settlers: French colonists at Port Royal in Acadia were recording "cherries, plums and all other fruits" within a few years of 1606. The varieties that now define American cherries were bred much later, on the Pacific coast and in the Great Lakes.

'Bing', still the standard dark sweet cherry of North America, was raised in 1875 in Milwaukie, Oregon, in the nursery of Seth Lewelling, from a seedling of 'Black Republican' (the pollen parent is thought to have been 'Royal Ann'). It was named for Ah Bing, the Chinese-born foreman who ran Lewelling's orchards for some sixteen years. According to Lewelling's stepdaughter, interviewed in 1939, the tree stood in Bing's row and its fruit was "big, as Bing was." Ah Bing returned to China around 1889 and, under the Scott Act of 1888 barring Chinese labourers from re-entry, was never able to come back: one of America's best-known fruits carries the name of a man its laws then excluded.

'Rainier', the yellow-and-pink blush cherry now sold at a premium, is a scientific cross made in 1952 by Harold Fogle at Washington State University between 'Bing' and 'Van', and named for Mount Rainier.

The tart cherry took a different road. 'Montmorency' is an old French Amarelle from the Montmorency valley north of Paris, grown in quantity there by the eighteenth century. In the United States it became almost the only tart cherry grown, and its capital is Traverse City, Michigan: the missionary Peter Dougherty planted the region's first cherry trees on the Old Mission Peninsula in 1852, they thrived unexpectedly in the lake-moderated climate, the first commercial orchard followed in 1893, and a "Blessing of the Blossoms" in May 1925 grew into the National Cherry Festival, so renamed in 1931. Michigan remains by far the leading American tart-cherry state, harvesting around ninety thousand tons in a normal year — and losing more than ninety per cent of its crop to a late frost in 2012.

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Sakura: The Cherry Grown for Its Blossom

One distinction is worth making once, because it confuses a great many readers. The Japanese flowering cherries — the sakura of spring festivals, the Yoshino and Kwanzan trees around the Washington Tidal Basin — are different species and hybrids (chiefly Prunus serrulata, Prunus × yedoensis and relatives), bred in Japan for blossom alone. They set little or no edible fruit; the two traditions meet only in the genus name.

The Washington trees have a documented history of their own: a first gift of 2,000 from Tokyo arrived in 1910 infested with insects and was burned on President Taft's order; a second of 3,020 trees, given by Tokyo's mayor Yukio Ozaki, was planted from 27 March 1912, when Helen Taft and Viscountess Chinda set the first two on the Tidal Basin. Those two trees still stand.

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The Maraschino Story

The bright red cherry on a sundae began as something quite different: a marasca, a small, dark, bitter-sour cherry of the Dalmatian coast around Zara (now Zadar, Croatia), steeped in a clear liqueur distilled from the same cherries, their stones and leaves. Dalmatian distillers made this maraschino from the early nineteenth century, and marasca cherries preserved in it became a scarce, expensive luxury across Europe and, late in the century, in the United States.

Supply could never meet demand, and American packers began making imitations from the pale 'Royal Ann' sweet cherry, bleached, dyed and sweetened. In 1912 the US Department of Agriculture ruled that "maraschino cherries" meant marasca cherries preserved in maraschino, and that the coloured, sweetened kind had to be labelled "imitation." Then Prohibition arrived in 1920 and the genuine article, being alcoholic, became illegal. The answer came from a university laboratory: Ernest H. Wiegand, a professor of horticulture at what is now Oregon State University, worked out in the mid-1920s a way to firm and preserve cherries in a brine of calcium salts before bleaching, dyeing and sugaring them — no alcohol, no marasca. In 1940 the US Food and Drug Administration formally redefined the maraschino cherry as a cherry dyed red, infused with sugar and packed in syrup flavoured with oil of bitter almonds or something similar. The name survived; the fruit inside it had changed completely.

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Pits, Cyanide and the Tart-Cherry Trials

Two threads of modern science attach to the cherry's history: a caution and a set of claims. Like apricot and bitter-almond kernels, the kernel inside a cherry stone contains amygdalin, a compound that releases hydrogen cyanide when it is crushed and meets an enzyme in the gut. A stone swallowed whole passes through intact; the risk is in chewed or crushed pits, and it takes several to produce symptoms. The same chemistry underlies the discredited "laetrile" cancer treatment, covered under Laetrile and Amygdalin.

The claims concern tart-cherry juice, studied since about 2000 for gout, sleep and muscle recovery. The founding papers are small and worth reporting exactly. In the gout study by Yuqing Zhang and colleagues (2012), 633 people with gout logged their attacks and their diet online for a year; over any two-day window, eating cherries was associated with a 35 per cent lower odds of an attack than not eating them (odds ratio 0.65, 95% confidence interval 0.50–0.85), and cherries plus allopurinol with 75 per cent lower odds. It was observational — nobody was assigned to eat cherries — so it shows association, not cause. In the sleep study by Glyn Howatson and colleagues (2012), 20 healthy volunteers drank Montmorency juice concentrate or a placebo for seven days each in a crossover design; urinary melatonin rose on the juice, and time in bed, total sleep time and sleep efficiency all increased significantly. In the running study by Kerry Kuehl and colleagues (2010), 54 relay runners drank tart-cherry juice or a placebo drink twice a day for a week before and during a race averaging 26 km over 24 hours; pain rose in both groups, but by 12 mm on a 100 mm scale in the cherry group against 37 mm on placebo.

Those are real, peer-reviewed results, and a 2018 review by Darshan Kelley and colleagues gathered dozens more. They are also small trials with short follow-up, mostly in healthy people, and none makes cherries a treatment for anything. A fruit valued for two thousand years as a fleeting summer pleasure acquired, in this century, a modest and still-developing evidence base — and a larger marketing one. The site's Tart Cherry page and the Cherries hub go through the evidence in detail.

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Cherries Today

The cherry is still an Anatolian fruit. In the FAO's figures for 2020 the world grew about 2.6 million tonnes of sweet cherries, and Turkey alone produced roughly 725,000 tonnes — more than a quarter of the total, fitting for the country that contains Giresun. The United States (about 295,000 tonnes, mostly from Washington, Oregon and California) and Chile (about 255,000 tonnes) came next, then Uzbekistan, Iran, Italy, Greece and Spain. Chile's rise is the newest chapter: its harvest ripens in December and January, and in two decades it has built an export trade that puts fresh cherries on northern tables, above all in China, in midwinter.

Sour cherries are a separate, smaller crop of around 1.5 to 1.6 million tonnes a year, and their map is eastern: Russia leads, with Turkey, Poland, Ukraine and Serbia next and the United States significant through Michigan. Almost all of it is processed — frozen, dried, juiced or canned — because a ripe sour cherry does not travel.

What has changed most is not the fruit but the tree and the calendar. Tall standard cherries picked from ladders have given way to compact trees on dwarfing rootstocks, netted against birds and often roofed in plastic against the rain that splits ripe fruit, and refrigerated freight has stretched a season that was once three weeks in July into most of the year. The two species still do what they have done since the Bronze Age — the sweet cherry eaten fresh and fast, the sour one cooked and kept — while their newly read genomes are used to breed the next 'Bing' and the next 'Montmorency'.

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Key Research Papers

The list covers the genomic work behind the two-species story and the sour cherry's hybrid origin, the standard horticultural history of the cherry's dissemination, and the three tart-cherry trials discussed above with a review that gathers them. Classical and early modern sources are linked under External Resources. Every DOI and PMID was checked against Crossref or PubMed before publication.

1. Pinosio S, Marroni F, Zuccolo A, Vitulo N, et al. (2020). A draft genome of sweet cherry (Prunus avium L.) reveals genome-wide and local effects of domestication. The Plant Journal. — doi:10.1111/tpj.14809
2. Shirasawa K, Isuzugawa K, Ikenaga M, Saito Y, et al. (2017). The genome sequence of sweet cherry (Prunus avium) for use in genomics-assisted breeding. DNA Research. — doi:10.1093/dnares/dsx020
3. Goeckeritz C, Rhoades K, Childs K, Iezzoni A, et al. (2023). Genome of tetraploid sour cherry (Prunus cerasus L.) 'Montmorency' identifies three distinct ancestral Prunus genomes. Horticulture Research. — doi:10.1093/hr/uhad097
4. Wöhner T, Emeriewen O, Wittenberg A, et al. (2021). The draft chromosome-level genome assembly of tetraploid ground cherry (Prunus fruticosa Pall.) from long reads. Genomics. — doi:10.1016/j.ygeno.2021.11.002
5. Tavaud M, Zanetto A, David J, et al. (2004). Genetic relationships between diploid and allotetraploid cherry species (Prunus avium, Prunus × gondouinii and Prunus cerasus). Heredity. — doi:10.1038/sj.hdy.6800589
6. Faust M, Surányi D (1996). Origin and Dissemination of Cherry. Horticultural Reviews. — doi:10.1002/9780470650622.ch5
7. Zhang Y, Neogi T, Chen C, Chaisson C, Hunter DJ, Choi HK (2012). Cherry consumption and decreased risk of recurrent gout attacks. Arthritis and Rheumatism. — PubMed PMID: 23023818
8. Howatson G, Bell PG, Tallent J, Middleton B, McHugh MP, Ellis J (2012). Effect of tart cherry juice (Prunus cerasus) on melatonin levels and enhanced sleep quality. European Journal of Nutrition. — PubMed PMID: 22038497
9. Kuehl KS, Perrier ET, Elliot DL, Chesnutt JC (2010). Efficacy of tart cherry juice in reducing muscle pain during running: a randomized controlled trial. Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition. — PubMed PMID: 20459662
10. Kelley D, Adkins Y, Laugero K (2018). A Review of the Health Benefits of Cherries. Nutrients. — doi:10.3390/nu10030368

PubMed Topic Searches

1. PubMed: Cherry domestication and origin
2. PubMed: Sour cherry hybrid origin
3. PubMed: Cherry archaeobotany
4. PubMed: Tart cherry juice randomised trials

External Authoritative Resources

• FAOSTAT — world cherry and sour cherry production by country and year
• Pliny the Elder, Natural History Book 15 (Latin text, LacusCurtius) — the Lucullus passage and the named varieties
• Capitulare de villis (Latin text, Bibliotheca Augustana) — chapter 70, the estate plant list
• John Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris (1629), Internet Archive — the orchard section on cherries
• Wikipedia — Bing cherry, with the 1939 Federal Writers' Project interview and the 2025 Lewelling family history as sources

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Connections

• All Food
• Cherries Hub
• Cherries Nutrient Profile
• Tart Cherry
• Gout
• Anthocyanins
• Melatonin
• Laetrile and Amygdalin
• Plums
• Apricots
• Peaches
• Apples: History and Origins
• Raspberries: History and Origins

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