BIRD CHERRY (Prunus padus)
Family: Rosaceae
The Bird Cherry is a small
to medium-sized tree. It grows in huge numbers in moist temperate woodlands throughout
the world, including the British Isles (for distribution maps see Online Atlas ofthe British and Irish Flora;
Houston Durrant and Caudullo 2016; Uusitalo 2004). Today, Bird Cherry regularly
dominates the strips of woodland bordering streams and ditch-banks. It has a
tendency to sucker, so often forms dense thickets and can invade pastures,
albeit not as vigorously as Blackthorn (see separate entry on Blackthorn).
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| Bird Cherry tree. (Glen Urquhart, September 2006) |
In its preferred streamside
locations, Bird Cherry is easily mistaken for one of the sallows (broad-leaved
willows, Salix spp.). This is the
case especially in autumn when its soft, yellow senescing leaves are suffused
with pinks, just as in some sallows. However, closer inspection reveals the
characteristic trusses of small jet-black berries, which are unique amongst
fruit bearing trees in Britain. In May and June Bird Cherry trees are instantly
recognisable from the long, drooping racemes of 20-40 white, heavily scented
flowers (Uusitalo 2004: 20-23).
 |
Bird Cherry blossom.
(Hailsham, May 2011)
|
Fruit harvesting
Harvesting Bird Cherry fruits by beating the trees with a
forked stick has proved unsuccessful because in most instances they are too
tenaciously attached to their short stalks to be detachable by this means
(Hillman unpublished field notes). More vigorous beating succeeded merely in
smashing the fruits on the tree. Collection by hand of individual fruits, or
fruit trusses is more effective.
 |
Bird Cherry fruits.
(near Alfriston, July 2007)
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‘Poisonous fruits’
In his authoritative and comprehensive ‘Complete book of British Berries’ Lang lists Bird Cherry as ‘poisonous’
and describes the translucent green flesh of the fruits as having an “unpleasant foetid odour and a foul taste
which dries the mouth” (Lang 1987: 108). Peoples’ perception of taste
varies and some find the flavour of the ripe Bird Cherries rather pleasant
(Hillman pers. comm.), albeit with a slight bitterness and an almond aroma indicative
of the presence of the poisonous glycoside called amygdalin, which releases
hydrogen cyanide (HCN) when the flesh is crushed (the Bird Cherry entry in
Plants For A Future [PFAF] database)
warns
that any very bitter fruits or seeds should not be eaten as this is likely an
indication of high toxicity). There is also a slight astringency indicating
the presence of anti-digestive tannins. But, as discussed for Sloe, not only
can the toxic component of amygdalin be largely eliminated, but the tannins can
also be immobilized (see separate entry on Blackthorn, and specifically the
section on how to make the fruits edible).
 |
Bird Cherry ripe fruits – last few
still on tree. (Alfriston, July 2005)
|
The same toxins are present in the kernel of the Bird-Cherry
fruit-pit (Uusitalo 2004: 39), just as they are in the kernels of the larger
stone-fruits (‘drupes’) such as plums, bitter almonds and apricots, which, in
recent times in Turkey and Syria, were removed from the pits and pounded to
prepare a cyanide-rich ‘milk’ for eliminating head-lice (Hillman pers. comm.).
Again, the kernels of all these stone-fruits can theoretically be detoxified in
order to make use of the rich reserves of starch, oil and protein (Desser 2015:
28; Sharma et al. 2005). Indeed, most marzipan is today made from the
detoxified kernels of apricots rather than almonds (known as persipan or
parzipan[i]).
However, the pits of Bird-Cherry are considered too small for the kernels to be
worth extracting individually.
 |
| Bird Cherry stones. (Hailsham) |
Detoxification of both flesh and kernel
Anderson (2002) documents the detoxification methods used by the Taz, Nanai,
Ulchi, Orok and Udegai peoples of the Amur Valley of the Russian Far East, who
continued to live as hunter-gatherers well into the 1940s and who
correspondingly retained knowledge of the wild species their ancestors ate and the
processing methods they used to make unpalatable plant foods edible. Bird
Cherry fruits were apparently one of their most heavily used wild foods. In her
accounts of interviews with the families living in the Amur Valley she
describes how they crushed the fruits in a single round of pounding with a
wooden pestle and mortar until the stones were thoroughly fragmented. The
mixture was spread on a flat surface, squeezed into thin flat cakes, which were
then roasted until all trace of the smell of bitter almonds (the hydrogen
cyanide, HCN) had disappeared. In the process, the cakes dried as a
gritty form of fruit leather that
could be stored for the winter and right through into the spring. The
fruit-leather cakes, or biscuits, could be eaten complete with all the
fruit-stone fragments, which is a reflection of both the relative thinness of
the wall of the stones in Bird Cherry and the comparatively restricted
deposition of silica in the cell walls[ii].
 |
Processing Bird Cherry – stone mortar, fruits,
crushed fruits
and flat ‘cake’. (Rothiemurchas,
September 2006)
|
“You put the fresh berries on a metate stone and mash them up, pits and
all, then dry them. The nut inside the pit has an almond-like aroma.... Like
most of the other members of this genus, chokecherries contain a form of
cyanide, but cyanide is very unstable, and is easily destroyed by heat, sunlight
and oxygen. Mashing and drying the chokecherries renders them safe to eat. The
pit shells are rather crunchy, but not nearly as obtrusive as you might think.
…The dried mash I just use as trail mix. I find I can hand-pick 1 gallon of
cherries per hour, which take another 40 minutes to mash with a rock.”
In preparing Chokecherries
the same way, Thayer (2010) comments on how the broken pit-shells were rather a
nuisance, but reports: “Throughout the
winter I eat chokecherry leather as a snack …”.
 |
Processing Bird Cherry – crushed fruits.
(Rothiemurchas, September
2006)
|
Prehistoric and historic usage
Prunus padus
remains (e.g., fruits, fruitstones) have been found on sites in Europe dating
from as early as the Late Mesolithic (c. 5000 cal. B.C.) and through to the
Medieval periods (see entry under the synonym Padus avium in Kroll 1998). There is evidence for the use of Bird
Cherry at the Late Mesolithic site of Hardinxveld-Giessendam de Bruin, in the
Rhine-Meuse delta, Netherlands (Out and Verhoeven 2014) and later in the Neolithic,
at the settlements of Nidau and Sutz Lattrigen on Lake Biel, Switzerland
(Brombacher 1997) and the Dutch wetland site of Bergschenhoek, which is
described as a fishing and fowling camp (Out 2012). Fruit stones are also
recorded at the Eneolithic/Copper Age pile-dwelling site of Hočevarica on Ljubljana Moor, central Slovenia (dated to c. 3500 cal. B.C.;
Jeraj et al. 2009). In the Medieval period, Prunus
padus finds are listed in samples from the
lakeshore settlement of Fonyód Bélatelep, on Lake Balaton, Hungary
(7th-9th century A.D.; Gyulai et al. 1992) and in buried
organic layers on a site in the south of Brno City, Czech Republic, dated to c.
1100 A.D (Rybníček et al. 1998). And, much further
afield in Mongolia, fruitstones were discovered in the Medieval capital city of
Qara Qorum, which was founded by Činggis
Qayan (Ghenghis Khan) in
the 13th century A.D. (Rösch et al. 2005). The authors note: “According to common opinion the ancient
Mongolians ate mainly meat, sometimes even raw” (Rösch et al. 2005: 485), but given the long list of
edible plants (many of which were imported) that were used in the city and in
Ghenghis Khan’s palace it would seem that the inhabitants also had penchant for
cereals, legumes, leafy vegetables, root foods and fruits, together with a
variety of herbs and spices (Rösch
et al. 2005: table 1).
There
are many recent historical records for the use of Bird Cherry in Eurasia: for
example, in Poland the fruits are listed as being eaten, and particularly by
children as a snack (Łuczaj 2008); in Estonia the fruits,
leaves and flowers had a variety of uses, including as spices for fermenting
cucumbers (Kalle and Sõukand 2012); in Russia dried fruits were used
as a tea substitute and were also ground to make flour for baking cakes,
biscuits and pancakes (Shikov et al. 2017); and in Sweden the fruits were used as
a flavouring in alcoholic drinks (brännvin; Svanberg 2012).
Other uses of Bird Cherry
The fruits of Bird Cherry have
medicinal properties and are particularly high in antioxidants (Danno et al.
2018.).
Bird Cherry bark is used in
dying and gives a dark green to grey colour[iv].
In his ‘Useful plants of Great Britain’,
Pierpoint Johnson (1862) says of Bird Cherry: “the wood is valuable, being beautifully veined…. [And] being very tough
and even in grain, it makes good handles for knives and carpenters’ tools”
(see also Uusitalo 2004: 16, who lists many uses of the wood, e.g., for legs of
chairs, musical instruments, fish poles, withes, etc.).
Bibliography
Anderson, S. 2002. Loss and change: a social history of wild
plant use in Taz, Udege and Nanai communities of the Russian Far East. Unpublished PhD Thesis, University College
London.
Brombacher, C. 1997.
Archaeobotanical investigations of Late Neolithic lakeshore settlements (Lake
Biel, Switzerland). Vegeation History and
Archaeobotany 6: 167-186.
Danno, D., Mellano, M.G., De Biaggi, M., Riondato, I.,
Rakotoniaina, E.N. and Beccaro, G.L. 2018. New findings in Prunus padus L. fruits as a source of natural compounds:
characterisation of metabolite profiles and preliminary evaluation of
antioxidant activity. Molecules 23(4),
725; doi:10.3390/molecules23040725
Desser, A.M. 2015. Quantification
of total cyanide content in kernels of stone fruits. Diplom-Ingenieurs, Fakultät für Technische Chemie,
Technischen Universität Wien. https://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_245521.pdf
[accessed: 17.04.18]
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Families. Hollowtop Outdoor Primitive School Publication, Pony, MT.
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1992. Plant remains from the early medieval lakeshore settlement Fonyód
Bélatelep (Lake Balaton, Hungary) with especial emphasis on the history of
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habitat, usage and threats. In: San-Miguel-Ayanz,J., de Rigo, D., Caudullo, G.,
Houston Durrant, T., Mauri, A. (eds.), European
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Jeraj, M., Velušček, A. and
Jacomet, S. 2009. The diet of Eneolithic (Copper Age, Fourth millennium cal
B.C.) pile dwellers and the early formation of the cultural landscape south of
the Alps: a case study from Slovenia. Vegetation
History and Archaeobotany 18: 75-89.
Johnson, P.C. 1862. The Useful Plants of Great Britain: A
Treatise Upon the Principal Native
Vegetables Capable of Application as Food, Medicine or in the Arts and
Manufactures. William Kent & Co., London.
Kalle,
R. and Sõukand, R. 2012.
Historical ethnobotanical review of wild edible plants of Estonia
(1770s-1960s). Acta Societatis
Botanicorum Poloniae 81(4): 271-281.
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N.J. 1991. Traditional Plant Foods of
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[Published online March 2009: http://www.fao.org/wairdocs/other/ai215e/ai215e00.HTM]
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in Poland in 1948. Journal of Ethnobiology
and Ethnomedicine 4:4 https://doi:10.1186/1746-4269-4-4
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fowling camp at Bergschenhoek, The Netherlands, in a wider context. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 21:
201-214.
Out, W.A.
and Verhoeven, K. 2014. Late Mesolithic and Early Neolithic human impact at
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485-492.
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Kaushal, B.B. and Vaidya, D. 2005. Utilization of stone fruit kernels as a
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https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.2005.696.97
https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.2005.696.97
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A.N., Pozharitskaya, O.N., Makarov, V.G. and Heinrich, M. 2017. Frontiers in Pharmacology 8:841 https//doi:
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harvesting and preparing edible wild plants. Forager’s Harvest, Birchwood, WI.
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[ii] In experimenting with the
processing of Bird Cherries gathered in Scotland, in order to pulverize the
pits effectively it was found necessary to crush them on a flat rock using a
hand-sized river-pebble; otherwise, the procedure followed was essentially the
same (Hillman unpublished field notes).
[iii] https://plants.usda.gov/core/profile?symbol=PRVI
[accessed:
17.04.18]; Kuhnlein and Turner (Traditional Plant
Foods of Canadian Indigenous Peoples, 1991) state that Chokeberries are the
most widely used fruit among Canadian indigenous groups.
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