Every year during May, the little town of Céret in Pyrénées-Orientales goes mad about cherries.
The climate there is particularly suited to the early production of delicious cherries, which are so good that they have inspired a two-day festival. Townspeople also send an annual selection to the president.
They are fragile from the opening of the first blossom until they appear on our tables. The flowers can easily be damaged by icy winds or a late frost in March or April.
It takes about six weeks from blossom to harvest. As they ripen they are vulnerable to pilfering by birds.
We frequently see cherry trees around us decorated with old CDs, which spin in the spring breeze, deterring avian thieves. Some neighbours net their trees and one even pushes a scarecrow through the branches.
Cherries must be gently picked by hand, with the cost of this careful harvest accounting for up to a third of the price we pay for them in a shop or market. Another cost is their rapid deterioration – up to 15% of the harvest can be lost between picking and packing.
Other parts of France also lay claim to being centres of commercial cherry production. Provence, and particularly the department of Vaucluse, provides roughly a third of France’s cherries and, like Céret, the region hosts regular events inspired by them.
If the flowers are your passion, Toulouse boasts a Japanese garden complete with pink cherry blossom, while Paris in the spring is famed for its romantic flowering cherry trees along the River Seine.
Most established gardens will have at least one productive cherry tree. The variety depends on how you intend to use the fruit.
Here, cherries fall into two categories: bigarreaux cherries, which are sweet and generally eaten raw or used in desserts; and griottes, which are sour and used in products such as kirsch and jam.
The most popular bigarreaux cherry in France is the Burlat. It is named after Léonard Burlat, a French soldier who, during World War One, took a cutting from a cherry tree he spotted in Lyon and grafted it onto a wild cherry tree (merisier) in his own garden.
From this union the Burlat cherry was developed. Half of the cherries now produced here are of this variety.
We used to have a large cherry tree with delicious dark red fruit in our garden. It was blown down in January 2009.
Various small cherry trees have since sprouted from the original tree’s roots, but their fruit is tiny with little flesh. I
suspect our old tree may have been a Burlat grafted onto a merisier rootstock – so suckers sprouting from the roots are from below the point of the graft and are merisiers.
We planted a replacement 10 years ago, but it will be a long time before it is as large and productive as the one we lost.
