For centuries, Romans and Greeks cultivated the darkest fruit and curated a variety of sweet, black cherries. From one tree into an orchard, agriculturalists discovered grafting, the art of adding a cutting to another tree to gain fruit from mature stock without having to wait for a seed to mature into a fruiting plant.
A tree is not an easy thing to export without the help of birds carrying seeds, but people found a way to move saplings across continents, to England and Asia, and eventually to North America. In the mid-1850s California and the Pacific Northwest became the center of cultivation, with new varieties emerging. Bings, Rainiers, Brooks, Tulare and many sweet cherries.
I grew up near orchards, within reach of fresh picked cherries from wooden fruit stands off the highway every summer. The last orchard stands in a corner of South County with houses on one side, a high school on the other and a for sale sign in front. The cherry trees that took millennia to arrive will be gone before next summer, making way for single-family homes.