Advice On Buying Cherry Trees

Your cherry trees will provide you with delicious fruit for many years to come: we want to make sure you choose the right ones for your garden. 
 

Your available space will determine the shape of tree that you can grow. There are 2 main options for the home grower.
 

1. Fan Trained Cherry Trees:
   This space-saving shape is grown flat with horizontal wires for support, usually against walls or fences.
   To make a fan cherry tree, you need to buy a Maiden sized tree (the smallest you can buy) and prune it into the desired shape.

2. Free Standing Cherry Trees:
   These two sizes take up more room and give the biggest crops:

• Bush form: This is a short tree with a main trunk under 1 metre tall and a final height of about 3 metres - great for most people's gardens, easy to harvest, and reasonably practical to cover with a net against birds.
• Half standard form: A "proper" tree with a trunk 1.2 - 1.5 metres tall and a final height up to 4-5 metres.
  It's the heaviest cropping size, but you will need a safe ladder to harvest your trees when they are full-grown.
   

Which Starting Size of Tree Should You Buy?
 

Maidens: These are the cheapest option and can be trained into any shape you like. If you want a fan, you must start with a maiden.
 

Bushes & Half-Standards: These are the largest starting sizes you can order: go for a half-standard if you have plenty of room or a bush if space is tight.
Even if you are on a tight budget, it still makes sense to start with these rather than a maiden, because you will spend less time on them and get your crops sooner. 
 

Sweet or Sour Cherries?
 

All sweet cherries need plenty of sun, especially in the North and Scotland, where it is best to train them as fans against a sheltered South facing wall.
 

The best varieties for Scotland are Lapins Cherokee, Stella, and Colney.


We only grow one sour cherry, the world-famous English Morello. It's the best acidic variety, and unlike sweet cherries it's very hardy and shade-tolerant. It thrives in North facing sites as long as it faces open sky.
 

Cherry Tree Pollination
 

The sour Morello cherry and some sweet varieties are reliably self-fertile.
 

• If you only have room for one cherry tree, choose a self fertile one.
• More than half of our sweet cherry varieties are not self fertile and must be pollinated by a compatible tree to bear fruit - this includes all the early fruiting trees.
• Use our interactive tool to choose cherry pollination partners.
   

Harvesting Cherry Trees
 

Cherry trees as a group have quite a short season, ranging from late June to August.
Cherries don't store well and need to be eaten, cooked, preserved as jam or frozen without delay when they are ripe. Remove the stones before freezing. 

If fresh cherries for your kitchen all summer is your dream, it is best to choose 3 or 4 types of cherry tree to cover the whole season:
 

Harvest Time	Cherry Variety
Early Season (June)	Early Rivers
Early-Mid Season (Early July)	Amber Heart, Knight's Early Black, Merton Glory, Merton Bigarreau, Lapins Cherokee
Late-Mid Season (Late July)	Van, Bigarreau Napoleon, Stella, Summer Sun, Sunburst, Vega, Morello (Sour)
Late Season (From Early August)	Sweetheart, Colney, Penny, Kordia, Petit Noir

 

Planting Cherry Trees
 

Watch our fruit tree planting film.
 

Your trees need good soil drainage and will suffer in heavy clay areas that trap water: heavy clay itself is fine, as long as it is on a hill or slope that sheds water well.
The more sun your trees get, the better your crops will be.
If your soil is poor, the effort you spend digging in lots of well rotted manure and compost to the depth of two spades will reward you with healthy trees and good crops for many years to come.
 

Pruning Cherry Trees
 

It is important to avoid pruning stone fruit (Prunus species, so that's plums, damsons, gages, mirabelles and cherries) during winter, when they are vulnerable to silver leaf disease.
During late spring and summer, their sap is flowing and will push out the fungal spores that cause the disease.
 

Rootstocks:
Cherry trees, like all named edible fruit trees, are cloned by taking cuttings from an adult tree and grafting them onto a rootstock from another tree.
We use Colt rootstocks, which are as close as it gets to being universal.
They are fine for growing your trees as a wire-trained fan and if you want a full sized tree, it will reach 4-5 metres.
 

Pricing:
We can keep our prices low because we only sell by mail order and our nursery is closed to the public.
Every tree has discounts on larger orders beginning when you buy 3 of a particular tree.
 

Delivery information:
 

The planting and delivery season for bareroot cherry trees is between November and March.

A limited range of potted cherry trees is available year round - these are delivered in pots but will need to be planted out.

You can place your order for bareroot cherry trees at any time of year and choose a winter delivery date that suits you.

Whenever you place your order, we will not charge you until your plants are ready to be shipped.

You will receive a reminder e-mail to notify you of the delivery date,

When they are delivered, we use a 24 hour courier service to get your order to you in top condition.