THE CHERRIES.
Small-fruited members of the genus prunus, wild and cultivated, are grouped under the popular name, cherries, by common consent. The pie cherry of New-England gar dens is prunus cerasus, Linn. It often runs wild from gar dens, forming roadside thickets, with small sour red fruits, as nearly worthless as at home in the wilds of Europe and Asia. This tree has, through cultivation, given rise to two groups of sour cherries cultivated in America. The early, light-red varieties, with uncolored juice, of which the Early Richmond is a familiar type, and the late, dark-red varieties, with colored juice, of which the English Morello is the type.
The sweet cherry of Europe (P. Avium, Linn.) has given us our cultivated sweet cherries, whose fruit is more or less heart-shaped.
Japan celebrates each spring the festival of cherry blos som time, a great national fete, when the gardens burst suddenly into the marvelous bloom of Sakura, the cherry tree, symbol of happiness, in which people of all classes de light. The native species (P. pseudo-Cerasus), has been cultivated by Japanese artist-gardeners in the one direction of beauty for centuries. Not in flowers alone, but in leaf, in branching habit, and even in bark, beauty has been the ideal toward which patience and skill have striven success fully. "Spring is the season of the eye," says the Japan ese poet. Of all their national flower holidays, cherry blossom time, in the third month, is the climax.