Cornelian Cherry

Cornelian Cherry (Cornus mas) has a genuinely ancient cultivation history, with real documentation showing its fruit was enjoyed by the ancient Greeks and later widely planted in medieval monastery gardens throughout Europe. Despite the common name and superficial resemblance, it is not a true cherry at all — Cornus mas is actually a dogwood, closely related to the familiar flowering dogwood (Cornus florida), and its fruit is classified botanically as a drupe by coincidence of structure rather than genetic relation to true cherries (Prunus). It remains a real, active commercial fruit crop today in Ukraine, Serbia, Turkey, Georgia, and Iran, where the ripe fruit is processed into juice, preserves, or fermented into wine, and unripe fruit is sometimes pickled in vinegar similarly to olives. In the United States it is grown mostly as a small ornamental tree, prized for being one of the very first woody plants to flower each spring in northeastern climates.