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Sentiment: Education

"Literae thesaurum est."   Education is a treasure.
Gaius Petronius

When Roman novelist Gaius Petronius wrote these seemingly simple words in the first century, to be educated meant being literate, and a thesaurus was a treasure or a treasury of words and knowledge. Writer Pamela Todd explains that the lore by which education became associated with the cherry alleges that Jesus gave a cherry to Saint Peter, instructing him to pay attention to detail and examine little things like the cherry.

Botanical species: Prunus avium and Prunus cerasus
Common Names: (P. avium) sweet or Mazzard cherry; (P. cerasus) Morello, pie, or sour cherry

Prunus is the ancient Latin name for plum and incorporates the stone-fruits - plum, cherry, peach, nectarine, apricot, and almond. The Latin species name of the sweet cherry, avium, means "of birds." Its fruit is indeed a favorite of birds, and it is sometimes known as bird cherry. Prunus cerasus was introduced into Europe from ancient Cerasus, on the Crimean peninsula.

Sweet cherry trees rapidly spread throughout temperate Europe and Britain via birds and humans. Sour or pie cherry trees spread more slowly, mainly by humans. Roman Lucius Lucullus brought sour cherry plants to Rome in 74 B.C. They were a gift from the city of Cerasus because Lucullus had acquired a fondness for them. By 1 A.D. Roman historian Pliny described ten types of cherries. Cultivated in Massachusetts only nine years after the Pilgrims arrived, cherry trees spread westward across North America with the settlers.

Description & Habitat: The sour cherry is a low round-headed tree with white flowers in small clusters mostly in advance of the oval leaves and red to purplish (sometimes yellow) fruit that matures in summer. There are several ornamental varieties, including a double-flowered form. It is a native of Asia Minor and perhaps southeast Europe. The sweet cherry is a tall robust tree with white flowers in dense clusters on spurs that appear with the young leaves; the shiny red fruit ripen in late spring and summer. It is a native of Europe and Western Asia.

© 2001 by CSL Press and Susan Loy. All rights reserved.

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