Chokecherry (Prunus virginiana)

The Common Chokecherry has a huge native range of the southern half of Canada down into the mountains of southern California over around the Great Lakes to New England down the Appalachians to northern Georgia. Despite that, I've only seen a few at Morton Arboretum that were planted and a few small wild ones on the dunes of Indiana Dunes State Park in northwest Indiana. In northern Illinois, eastern Iowa, southern Wisconsin, southeast Pennsylvania and Delaware I keep finding lots of her big sister, the Wild Black Cherry (P. serotina) that has longer, sharper leaves, but I have not seen any wild Chokecherries. I think she is more common farther west and north in her native range. The Common Chokecherry is usually a small bushy tree to 25 feet high, but it can be a multi-trunk small tree or a single trunk tree up to 35 to 50 feet high. The leaves are sort of rounded, being 2 to 4 inches long by 1 to 2 inches wide. It is fast growing of 2 to 3 feet/year and lives about 100 to 150 years. It has a shallow, fibrous root system and is easy to transplant. The cultivar called 'Shubert' or Canada' Red' is grown by conventional nurseries in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic and is a small, single-trunked, ornamental tree whose foliage turns purplish-red during summer.

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State fruit of North Dakota.

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