Bird Cherry (subgenus)
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The bird cherries are a subgenus of the genus Prunus, characterised by having deciduous leaves, flowers 12-30 together on slender racemes produced in late spring well after leaf emergence, and small, sour fruit usually only palatable to birds, hence the name. They are native throughout the temperate Northern Hemisphere.
Bird cherry is sometimes used as a food plant by Lepidoptera species including brimstone moth.
Some bird cherries, such as chokecherries, are used to make jelly and wine in North America.
Some botanists treat the subgenus as a distinct genus Padus.
Famous quotes containing the words bird and/or cherry:
“For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, I heard the forlorn but melodious note of a hooting owl indefinitely far; such a sound as the frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitable plectrum, the very lingua vernacula of Walden Wood, and quite familiar to me at last, though I never saw the bird while it was making it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I think it was your cherry pies.”
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