Prunus cerasifera cherry plum

Prunus cerasifera ‘Thundercloud’ next to Memorial Church; new purple leaves push out among the blossoms at the start of Lent. Sairus Patel, 2 Mar 2022

Double pink flowers of Prunus × blireana, Pine Hill Road. Sairus Patel, 20 Feb 2021

Our word “cherry” comes from cerasus, the latinized form of the Greek kerasos for the cherry. Kerasous, an ancient Greek colony in Pontus (the southern Black Sea area), now Giresun in modern-day Turkey, was apparently known for its cultivation of cherries. In his Natural History, Pliny tells us that the cherry was first introduced to Italy by Roman general Lucullus, who brought it from Pontus, where he defeated Mithridates in 73 BC. The tree may well have been proudly displayed in his triumphal procession back in Rome, as was the custom for victors. Pliny adds that at the time of his writing, a hundred and twenty years later, the cherry had arrived in Britain, and cheerfully enumerates the virtues of nine varieties, including one that tastes best eaten beneath the tree (it doesn’t transport well) and a “bitter but not unpleasant-tasting” laurel-cherry, perhaps referring to what we call Prunus laurocerasus. Modern-day edible sweet cherries are cultivars of P. avium and the sour of P. cerasus.

Cerasifera means cherry-bearing; the plums of P. cerasifera, which come in various colors, can indeed be tasty, though its beautiful flowers are what these trees are celebrated for. The species (which has green leaves) is primarily used as a rootstock; its cultivated selections – all with bronzy to purple leaves – are popular in the nursery trade and are generally known as purple-leaf plums.

Purple-leaf plum was first introduced to Europe in 1880 by M. Pissard, head gardener for the shah of Persia. That original selection was propagated as ‘Pissardii’; countless variations have been produced since. ‘Thundercloud’ is the most popular in commerce, with dark reddish-purple leaves and pink flowers; it is likely what we have in front of Slavianskii Dom (650 Mayfield Avenue) and along most of the length of Mayfield Avenue fronting Florence Moore Hall.

P. cerasifera will produce seedlings in moist conditions; the green-leaved trees at Kingscote Gardens on the left of the entrance from Kennedy Grove, and elsewhere in the garden, almost certainly originated thus. Purple-leaf plums near the drainage channel on Lasuen Street between Museum Way and Campus Drive, also likely volunteers, produce plums that are dark red in skin and flesh and quite flavorful.

The handsome specimen in front of the house at 984 California Avenue, Palo Alto, is likely ‘Vesuvius’ due to its long, richly hued maroon-purple leaves. The origins of this cultivar are obscure; it may be a cross between ‘Pissardii’ and the Japanese plum, P. salicina.

Old-fashioned P. × blireana is another cross, one between ‘Pissardii’ and a double-flowered kind of Japanese plum (P. mume). Originally published spelled blireiana (of Blere in France), obscure rules of botanical nomenclature resulted in the current blireana. It has petal-packed pink flowers of superlative beauty with hideously warty trunks to accompany them, and is often the first of the Prunus to bloom (late January or early February). See several at 820 and 828 Pine Hill Road, the remainder of a row of a dozen. Three in the north courtyard of Beckman Center are campus’s largest. Eight planted around Memorial Church in 1984 have been removed by now because of declining health or landscaping changes; the last of the lot, on the west side of the church, was removed in 2024, and two next to a still-thriving ‘Thundercloud’ on the east side of the church in 2020.

Name derivation: Prunus – Latin name for the plum tree; cerasifera – cherry-bearing; blireana – of Bléré, France.