Planting & Aftercare .
Provenance
The Forestry Commission impose a 15% limit on the amount of Wild Cherry (Prunus Avium) on any of their plantations. I can see why: they are a complete pain. Not helped, of course, by the fact that many of ours are actually Sweet Cherry: the by-product of East European jam factories. The suppliers, in pursuit of profit, substituted these misshapen brutes for the real thing. Unfortunately the difference is undetectable until several years have passed and by then its too late.
Species
We obtained our Cherries from at least 3 different nurseries: some actually appear to be genuine Wild Cherry; many are Sweet Cherry and the rest are, in fact, Bird Cherry. The latter were probably due to simple incompetence on the part of the supplier rather han downright dishonesty.
Sweet Cherry is grown for its low, heavy-branching habit and is totally unsuitable for growing as timber. Wild Cherry has a nasty habit of either dying for no apparent reason or developing bacterial canker at the slightest opportunity. Both produce prodigous quantities of seed that germinate freely and produce crops of young seedlings as profuse as any weed.
The idea was to use the Cherries as a "nurse" crop for Oaks. However their growth is so rapid that they are now shading out the oak crop. There are so many Cherry saplings that I am going to be very ruthless and thin out as many of the Cherry as I can.
Anyway, the timber can all be used as firewood.
Tree guards
I have found that it is unwise to use tree-guards or plastic spirals on Cherry trees. They simply grow so fast that the plastic in the guards cannot degrade quickly enough. This means that the tree guards become so tight around the trunks that no air can circulate and the bark quickly begins to rot and fall away. Plastic spiral guards soon become embedded in the quickly growing wood and cause wounds where the inevitable canker will strike.
Formative Pruning .
Cherry is prone to a bacterial canker. The standard advice is to prune during the hot, dry months in the summer when the risk of wound infection is minimised: dream on. It is far more difficult to see what you are doing when a tree is in full leaf and it appears to make no difference whatsoever to the infection rate. Many of my trees have developed the problem without me going anywhere near them.
Cherry bark is very thin and delicate. It will tear very easily if great care is not taken with the pruning cuts. I now reserve pruning for the most promising specimens and only use the best, sharpest pruning saws for them. (I use Silky Fox saws: they aren't paying me, they are just the best).
I also clean the secateurs, loppers and saws with methylated spirit between each tree, but I am not sure if it does any good.
Coppicing
I have been told that Wild Cherry will not regrow from cut stumps. This has been my experience in the past; but one or two poorly-formed trees, that were cut down in 2006 for firewood, have sent out new coppice shoots. This may have something to do with the height of the cut: the trees with regrowth were cut at around 6", the others were cut lower.
Coppice regrowth
Timber Properties .
Cherry has a "diffuse-porous" wood. Furthermore, it retains some of the water-bearing cells through the winter. This enables it to come into leaf very early in the year. As a result it is very fast-growing. As the wood itself is very dense, it makes it ideal for firewood.