Prunus mahaleb - St Lucie Cherry

[greg27]

Prunus mahaleb, or St Lucie cherry - it's not grown for the fruit, and there are prunus species with more stunning blossom displays, but it is (or was?) used as rootstock and has become naturalised in some areas of AU so is available to me to dig.

Small leaves, small flowers, and apparently small fruit, so it might be worth a bit of attention. I dug a few in autumn and all survived, so I might need to go back for a bunch more next season.

[KIRKY]

Lovely! Glad they all survived
Cheers
Kirky

[SquatJar]

Yep, an awesome species judging by what the Europeans have been doing with it. Apparently tough as nails too, even better than cerasifera.

Have all your prunus you've dug turned out to be mahaleb??

I'm still waiting on mature leaves on all of my digs to determine if they're mahaleb or cerasifera.

The only thing I think cerasifera has over mahaleb is it seems to flower earlier on bare branches

[greg27]

Have all your prunus you've dug turned out to be mahaleb??

I ended up with a mix of mahaleb and cerasifera. I could mostly tell the difference when I dug them as they still had leaves, but I failed at labelling them so forgot which was which

It'll be interesting to see how the mahalebs bark up - all the ones I've dug have very smooth trunks. I might give one a bit of the sandpaper treatment as is possible with olives to see what happens.

[SquatJar]

Looks like Mahaleb will get great bark with age, see
https://doriyama.blogspot.com/2020/08/y ... -this.html