The first fruits grew on bushes and shrubs in places with moderate temperatures, fertile soil, ocean breezes. People gathered the tart fruit when they found it, sometimes eating it fresh, sometimes smashing it to pulp or drying it to carry on long travels. Birds pecked at the flesh, carried it distances over seas and oceans to new continents.
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.
