Blackthorn and cherry plum

Bill Meek explores the blossom of plums and cherries commonly found in our county’s hedgerows.

Spring can be a cold, patience-testing season here in the east of England. While there are always fine days to enjoy, stubbornly low temperatures or even proper cold snaps can occur right through April and beyond, and it is not until well into May that we can be sure we’re out of the woods as far as frost is concerned.

Sometimes, late cold snaps will coincide with the flowering blackthorn, whose massed white blossom across Lincolnshire’s farmland may mingle with flurries of snow – a so-called ‘blackthorn winter’.

Of all the hedgerow plums and cherries, blackthorn is the most abundant, the smallest-flowered and the thorniest. In warmer spots in villages or on the sunny south side of woodlands, a little flowering blackthorn can usually be found before the end of February. Generally, however, March and April are when blackthorn blossom transforms long lengths of our county’s hedgerows, its white flowers borne in profusion on dark, leafless twigs. As the weather improves, blackthorn blossom is succeeded by the much more patchily distributed but larger flowers of the various naturalised plums, damsons and gages with their bewildering array of hybrids, before all are eclipsed by the billowing cream masses of hawthorn blossom in late April and May.

Early flowering
There is one plum species whose blossom appears even before the Blackthorn. Any small patch of brilliant white flowers in rural hedgerows and woodland edges well before the end of February will belong to the naturalised cherry plum Prunus cerasifera. Its flowers are larger, and its leaf-burst earlier, than blackthorn. Its first year twigs, on close inspection, are green rather than black.

But it is in towns and villages that the early-flowering cherry plum has the most profound transformative effect, the white-flowered type being joined here by cultivars with pink flowers and purple foliage.

In Lincolnshire, cherry plum is extremely common as a street tree and in larger gardens, and the simultaneous flowering of this species across our towns and villages in March is in no small part responsible for creating the feeling of approaching spring.

Var. ‘Nigra’ of cherry plum has the darkest foliage and the deepest pink flowers, but it is var. ‘Pissardii’, with its deep pink buds and nearly-white flowers set against dark twigs, which arguably provides the better spectacle in spring sunshine.

Producing flowers at such an early season creates difficulties for an insect-pollinated tree. On warm, sunny days the blossom may attract all manner of early pollinators such as hoverflies, queen bumblebees, and butterflies such as peacock, small tortoiseshell and comma.

However, in years when the weather is poor throughout the flowering period, fruit set may be poor or even missed. After flowering, cherry plum becomes a quite unprepossessing small tree which lacks the spectacular autumn colours of some other cherries.

The fruits, when such are produced, can vary in colour from yellow to mahogany red, as well as varying greatly in size, smell and sweetness. But it is the blossom which makes this plant such an important icon of spring, appearing in countryside and town alike just when you need it most.

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