The St Lucie cherry is usually a shrub.
St Lucie Cherry
Prunus mahaleb
Prunus mahaleb is usually a shrub, six metres tall on a good day, grown mostly as rootstock for other cherries rather than as a specimen in its own right. We map 3 of them, in 3 cities.
Three trees on this site ignore that description entirely. Budapest's, in the ELTE Fuveszkert botanical garden, stands 11.2 metres tall with a trunk 339 centimetres round, already growing on a nobleman's private estate before the university bought the ground around it in 1847. Den Bosch's, rooted for roughly a century against the medieval city wall on Parklaan, was nominated for the Dutch national Bomen Top 50 in 2022. Matera's, the thinnest evidenced of the three, has given its name to the city's Lanera district even though this pass could not confirm whether it still stands. Hungarians call the species sajmeggy, the Dutch call it Weichselboom; both names describe a fruit few gardeners plant a tree this size to get.
Budapest
Den Bosch
The St Lucie Cherry growing against Den Bosch's old city wall on Parklaan is a species most Dutch gardeners have never planted on purpose.
Photo: FaceMePLS (CC BY 2.0)
Matera
This is the thinnest evidenced tree on our list, and the story says so plainly rather than dressing it up.
Explore by city: Budapest · Den Bosch · Matera · Leiden · Brussels · Brisbane · Seville · Munich · every city · or browse all species.