Robins come to our cherry trees in June, and they hunt for our
strawberries under the green leaves. The blackberries come on, and the
raspberries, and currants. The birds look at them with calculating eyes.
An appetite for berries is inherited in them, learned in the woods, where
wild berries have grown, and ripened for them, from the times long before
there were gardens and cultivated fruits.
Back in the woods we shall find wild berries ripening, and birds feasting
thankfully upon them. The harvest begins with the June-berries in the
month of June. Serviceberries they are also called, and the tree is known
also as the shadbush. We remember the lovely veil of white blossoms this
tree put on before its leaves came out. In June we might not know the
trees, except that they bear red berries, few on a cluster, and here the
birds are feasting.
There is no other tree with berries that ripen so early, unless it be the
broad-leaved mulberry. Here, too, the birds will be found in numbers.
Turn back the wide, heart-shaped leaves, and you will find the single
berries of all sizes, some green, some reddening and soft. They are like
blackberries, each made of many tiny berries, grown together.
The beauty of the mulberry is that its fruit keeps coming on from June
until August. It is a very slow, easy-going tree, in no hurry to have its
harvest over. The birds like the soft, seedy berries, which to our taste
are insipid.
It is a shrewd thing to plant mulberry trees on the edges of fruit
gardens, and set a row of June-berry trees along the road outside the
cherry orchard. It is the scarcity of wild berries that brings the birds
into our gardens. Many a fruit-grower has saved his crop by planting wild
berry trees for the birds.
The elders are shrubby trees with large, fern-like leaves. They lift up
flat, white flower clusters, sometimes as large as dinner plates, in
June, and in the middle of summer dark red berries are ripening where the
flowers were. Here is another feast for the birds, and elderberry pies
are the reward of boys and girls who gather the berries, and take them
home to mother. Grandma thinks of elderberry wine, so good for many
ailments, and if the berries are plenty it is easy to gather a bucketful
to make a few pints of this old-fashioned cordial.
Among the shining green leaves of the wild red cherry tree the little
fruits glow like rubies in the summer. Here is a feast for the birds. We
find these small pin cherries very thin-fleshed, and sour, and the
biggest of them is no larger than a pea. But how the birds love them! The
bird cherry is indeed the bird’s tree. In blossom it belongs to the bees,
which come in swarms for nectar. To them, unconscious carriers of pollen
from flower to flower, the birds owe a debt of gratitude. They insure the
setting of seed, and this means a big crop of fruit.
The wild black cherry is later with its shining clusters of dark red
cherries. They come in September, when the birds’ procession has turned
southward. The earliest comers hold high carnival in these trees, devour
quantities of the bitter-sweet fruit, and drop the seeds near and far.
The wind can do little in scattering the seeds of fruit trees. The birds
are the chief agents of distribution.