The cherry belongs to the rose family and to the genus Prunus, the great clan of the stone fruits that also gives the plum, the peach, the apricot, and the almond; within it the cherries form their own group, the subgenus Cerasus, marked by their long-stalked fruit borne in clusters. Two species carry the whole weight of the cherry in the Western kitchen, and they are quite distinct. The sweet cherry, Prunus avium, the wild gean or mazzard, is a tall forest tree of Europe and western Asia, and it is the dessert cherry, eaten fresh and ripe: the Bing, the Rainier, the dark Lapins of the modern orchard all descend from it. The sour cherry, Prunus cerasus, is a smaller, hardier, more shrubby tree, and it is no simple species but an ancient natural hybrid, an allotetraploid born of a cross between the sweet cherry and the dwarf ground cherry (Prunus fruticosa) somewhere in the cool country between the Black and Caspian Seas. Its fruit is too sharp to eat raw with pleasure but unrivalled in the pot: the Morello, the Montmorency, the Amarena, the Persian albaloo, the cherry of pies, preserves, soups, and the bottle.

The two were gathered and grown together across their shared homeland, the broad belt of Anatolia, the Caucasus, and northern Iran, and it is from a city of that coast that the cherry takes its very name. On the far side of the world, quite separately, East Asia raised its own cherries: the Chinese cherry (Prunus pseudocerasus, the yingtao), cultivated for its fruit for some three thousand years, and the flowering cherries of Japan (Prunus serrulata and its kin), the sakura, grown not for fruit at all but for blossom, whose salted flowers and leaves are a true ingredient of the Japanese kitchen. A handful of further cherries skirt the table: the mahaleb (Prunus mahaleb), whose ground kernels, mahleb, scent the festive breads of Greece and the Levant, and the cornelian cherry (Cornus mas), a dogwood and no true cherry at all, gathered for its tart red fruit across Anatolia and the Caucasus.

The cherry's westward journey is one of the best-documented of any fruit, for the Romans recorded it. Both the sweet and the sour cherry grew wild across the lands between the Black and Caspian Seas, and it was from the Pontic city of Cerasus, modern Giresun on the Black Sea coast of Turkey, that the cultivated cherry took its name. By tradition the Roman general Lucullus, having defeated Mithridates of Pontus, carried the cherry tree back to Rome in 74 BCE; whether or not he brought the first tree, the cherry was established in Italy within a generation, and Pliny the Elder, writing a century later, lists the varieties already grown. From Rome the legions and colonists carried the sweet cherry across the empire, planting it through Gaul, Germania, and Britannia, so that the orchard cherry spread the length of temperate Europe. In England it found its great home in the orchards of Kent, planted in earnest in the reign of Henry VIII and making that county the Garden of England; with the colonists it crossed the Atlantic, and in 1875 the orchard foreman Ah Bing gave his name to the dark, firm sweet cherry of the Pacific North-West that became the dessert cherry of America, whilst the tart-cherry orchards of Michigan supplied its pies.

The sour cherry told a parallel tale. In Persia and the lands of the south Caspian it became the albaloo, the sour cherry whose dried and fresh fruit perfumes the great jewelled rice albaloo polo. Carried west across Anatolia and through the Byzantine and Ottoman Balkans, the sour cherry sank deep into the cooking of Central and Eastern Europe: the meggy of Hungary and its cold cherry soup, the wiśnia of Poland, the višnja of the Serbs, and the Schattenmorelle of the German Black Forest, where cherries and their kirsch crown the chocolate gâteau. On the Dalmatian coast the small dark marasca cherry was distilled into maraschino, the cherry liqueur of Zadar. And in the East, in Japan, the flowering cherry became something it became nowhere else: not a fruit but a flower for eating, its blossoms and young leaves salt-pickled to scent the sweets and rice of spring.

The cherry divides cleanly into its sweet and sour halves, and the two are scarcely interchangeable. The sweet cherry (Prunus avium) is above all a fruit to eat fresh, the glossy dark Bing and the blushing yellow-pink Rainier of the early-summer market, and Turkey, the United States, and Chile lead the world in growing it; in the kitchen it is folded, dark and whole, into the batter of a French clafoutis, and it is the fruit of the fresh cherry season everywhere it will grow. The sour cherry (Prunus cerasus), too sharp for the hand, is the cherry of cooking: the Morello and Montmorency of the pie and the preserve, the Amarena of the Italian confectioner, the albaloo of the Persian rice pot, the meggy of the Hungarian soup, and the Schattenmorelle that, with its kirsch, defines the Black Forest gâteau. From sour cherries come the great cherry drinks, the Persian sharbat, the Dalmatian maraschino, and the kirschwasser of the Rhine.

The cherry carries a weight of meaning beyond the plate. In Japan the flowering cherry, the sakura, is the very emblem of the nation and of the fleeting beauty of life, and its salted blossoms and leaves flavour the pink sakura mochi and the celebratory blossom tea of spring. In the West the cherry is the fruit of fleeting summer and of small indulgence, its season short and its image everywhere, from the glacé cherry of the cake to the bright maraschino of the cocktail, from the cherry orchard of Chekhov to the cherry tree of the young George Washington. Grown across every temperate land, eaten fresh by the handful and cooked into the most beloved of puddings and preserves, the cherry remains one of the most universally cherished of all the stone fruits.