My Cherries Amour

Cherries abound in romantic songs, saucy rhymes, and just plain sweet poems.

UB40’s reggae number Cherry, Oh Baby is a pure love-gush (about which more in the accompanying GastroTurf column). Or take a bite of KT Tunstall’s splendid early Noughties rocker Black Horse and the Cherry Tree, or the in-your-face Cherry Bomb (The Runaways, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, among others). Basically any conservative dad’s nightmare, that last one.

There are cherries on Netflix at the moment too, and they’re being popped all over the place, in a British series called Sex Education, and if you think it’s one to skip past – spotty teens, rowdy schoolgrounds et al – you’d be missing something that’s way better than just a silly teen drama. Okay, there is lots of turning on in the series (although there’s a tongue-in-cheek quality to much of the sex), but behind all that is a brilliant human story, a school shed load of endearing characters and some less than endearing, and a great one to binge watch in this sensual season. And that woman at the centre of it all, the mother of our teen boy hero, is Gillian Anderson. I barely recognised her; and what a gobsmackingly good performance.

But cherries are somewhat less romantic if you assess them by their Wikipedia description: “A cherry is the fruit of many plants of the genus Prunus, and is a fleshy drupe (stone fruit).” Nobody wants to encounter a fleshy drupe, especially if suddenly encountering one in a dark alley in the pry of night, such a passion-killer. If we had to assess every food type according to its Wikipedia description we’d all just give up fresh fruit and eat prunes. Or fleshy drupes.

Trying to find the joyful, or at least the vaguely satisfied, lore of the cherry on Wikipedia delivers such delights as “Cherries were introduced into England at Teynham, near Sittingbourne in Kent, by order of Henry VIII, who had tasted them in Flanders”; that “common rootstocks include Mazzard, Mahaleb, Colt, and Gisela Series, a dwarfing rootstock”, and that, like almost every other fruit and vegetable it seems, the cherry originates in Turkey. Of course it does. There’s no mention of the prevalence and lore of cherries in Far Eastern cultures. Which is odd. Then again, in Widipedia’s scan of “the world”, Africa is nowhere in it. Of course it isn’t.

Best we go to Shakespeare for something less soporific.

Oh, the twyning cherries shall their sweetness fall upon thy tasteful lips

Cherries of the night are riper
Than the cherries pluckt at noon
Gather to your fairy piper
When he pipes his magic tune

Merry merry
Take a cherry
Mine are sounder
Mine are rounder
Mine are sweeter
for the eater
under the moon
And you’ll be fairies soon

In the cherry pluckt at night
With the dew of summer swelling
There’s a juice of pure delight
Cold, dark, sweet, divinely smelling

Cherry White

I never see that prettiest thing
A cherry-bough gone white with spring
But that I think ‘How gay t’would be
to hang me from a flowering tree’

Oh Cherry, oh Cherry, oh baby
Don’t you know I’m in need of thee?