cherry scionwood (prunus avium)

we offer dormant cherry scionwood selected for excellent fruit, northern hardiness, and reliable performance in challenging climates. our collection is small for now, but we intend to add additional sweet and sour cherry cultivars as suitable material becomes available.

‘ridgewood’ — bred at cornell’s new york state agricultural experiment station in geneva from a 1975 cross of ‘starks gold’ × ‘stella’ and selected as ny 13791. ‘ridgewood’ combines several unusually valuable traits for northern cherry growers: it is self-fertile, very late blooming, cold hardy, frost resistant, and a heavy annual producer. the large sweet cherries ripen dark red to purple-black, with abundant juice, good flavor, and dark flesh. the cultivar has historically been sold commercially under the blackgold name.

late flowering is particularly interesting in a sweet cherry. winter hardiness alone does not guarantee a crop in the north: a tree can survive winter perfectly and then lose its flowers to a badly timed spring frost. ‘ridgewood’ was specifically selected for late bloom and flower-bud frost tolerance, helping it evade some of that risk.

its self-fertility also makes it unusually convenient for a home orchard. a single tree can set fruit without another sweet cherry cultivar nearby, while its late bloom also makes it useful as a pollenizer for other compatible late-flowering sweet cherries.

growing cherries from scionwood

scionwood is dormant one-year wood used to reproduce a cultivar by grafting. once a graft succeeds, the growth above the union is genetically identical to the original fruiting tree.

cherries can be grafted onto several compatible rootstocks. for growers interested in full-sized, vigorous trees, we particularly like seed-grown mazzard (prunus avium), the traditional sweet-cherry seedling rootstock. it produces substantial, long-lived trees and has excellent compatibility with sweet-cherry cultivars.

scionwood makes it inexpensive to establish a new tree, topwork an existing cherry, or put several cultivars onto a single tree. as our collection expands, this page will include additional cherry genetics for growers interested in building diverse northern orchards.

scionwood is shipped dormant and should be kept cool and moist until grafting. it is propagation material rather than a rooted tree, and successful grafting is ultimately the responsibility of the grower.