Some Cherry Trivia Facts

1) Cherries are drupes, or stone fruits, related to plums and more distantly to peaches and nectarines. They have been enjoyed since the Stone Age-pits were found in several Stone Age caves in Europe. The Romans carried cherries throughout Europe and England along the routes of conquest.

2) The Romans are believed to have discovered cherries in Asia Minor in about 70 BC and introduced them to Britain in the first century AD.

3) Although the fruit has always been popular for dessert and culinary purposes, cherries were used during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for their medicinal properties.

4) The German word Kirsch, the cherry liqueur, came from the word karshu, the name given to the first cultivated cherries in Mesopotamia in 8 BC.

5) Hot cherry stones were once used in bed-warming pans and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream associates cherries with love and romance

6) Cherries have a very short fruiting season. In Australia they are usually at their peak around Christmas time, in southern Europe in June, in America in June, and in the UK in mid July.

7) Annual world production (as of 2003) of domesticated cherries is about 3 million tons, of which a third are sour cherries. In many parts of North America they are among the first tree fruits ripe; hence the colloquial term "cherry" to mean "new" or "the first", e.g. "in cherry condition".

8) Cherry is the common name for several related trees, and for the edible fruit of some species. The genus containing cherry trees also includes plums, peaches, almonds, and apricots. Because many of these plants have been cultivated for thousands of years and widely hybridized, the classification is complex.

9) The ancestors of most of the modern cultivated varieties of cherry are probably the sweet, or dessert, cherry and the sour, or pie, cherry. The sweet cherry tree is frequently planted for its fruit and for its beauty when in flower, and also for its value as a timber tree. It grows rapidly and has strong, close-grained wood, suitable for use by cabinetmakers, turners, and musical-instrument makers. Double varieties of both species are also grown.

10) The word "cherry" comes from the French word "cerise," which comes in turn from the Latin words cerasum and Cerasus (the Classical name of the modern city of Giresun in Turkey).

11) The Japanese sakura in particular are a national symbol celebrated in the yearly Hanami festival. Many flowering cherry cultivars (known as 'ornamental cherries') have the stamens and pistils replaced by additional petals ("double" flowers), so are sterile and do not bear fruit. They are grown purely for their flowers and decorative value. The most common of these sterile cherries is the cultivar 'Kanzan'.

12) Broadway in New York shifts west at East 10th Street because a cherry tree once stood there.

13) There are more than 1,000 varieties of cherries in the United States, but fewer than 10 are produced commercially.

14) Seventy percent of the cherries (both sweet and tart) produced in the United States come from four states (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Utah).

15) Michigan has over 35,000 acres of tart cherry trees and grows almost 75% of the tart cherries produced in the United States. Traverse City is called the Cherry Capital of the World.

16) The cherry is the state fruit of Utah. Kane, Pennsylvania, is the Black Cherry Capital of the World

17) At one time it was against the law to serve ice cream on cherry pie in Kansas.

18) There are about 7,000 cherries on an average tart cherry tree (the number varies depending on the age of the tree, weather and growing conditions), and it takes about 250 cherries to make a cherry pie, so each tree potentially could produce enough cherries for 28 pies. 

19) The Cherry Pit Spit began in 1974, when Herb Teichman, a Michigan cherry farmer, was looking for 'something to do' with cherry pits. Growing from a neighborhood get-together to an international competition, the Cherry Pit Spit is recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as an official competition.

'Pellet Gun' Krause is the 10-time winner of the International Cherry Pit Spitting Championship. Each July hundreds of people from across the country and around the world gather for the Championship. The contest marks the beginning of the harvest of tart cherries in southwest Michigan

20)  The cherry has been associated with virginity from ancient times to modern, which probably arose from the red colored fruit with enclosed seed symbolizing the uterus. Maya, the virgin mother of Buddha was offered fruit and general support by a holy cherry tree while she was pregnant.