Prunus mahaleb Seeds | Mahaleb Cherry
LATIN NAME: Prunus mahaleb
COMMON NAME: Mahaleb Cherry
Plant Profile
Cut a branch of Mahaleb cherry and you get a smell rather than a stain: new-mown hay, warm and sweet, rising from wood that is otherwise unremarkable. The source is coumarin, the same lactone that gives sweet clover and tonka bean their signature, and it is the reason this small tree spent a century in the pipe trade, its stems bored out as stem stock for tobacco pipes because the wood scented the smoke as it warmed.
The wood is dense, close-grained, tough and takes a fine polish, and those properties made it a traditional stock for turned work. Walking sticks and canes were cut from the straight young stems, umbrella handles and riding crops were turned from the older wood. For pipes the wood was sawn into billets, drilled lengthwise and finished by hand.
Mahaleb cherry earns more money as a rootstock than as anything else. Seedling mahaleb has been the standard understock for sweet cherries on dry, limy, stony ground for generations, because it is drought-tolerant, lime-tolerant, well anchored and modest in its demands, and because it crops the scion early. It is less happy in heavy wet soils and it suckers from the roots, which means constant removal of shoots around the trunk.
Modern cherry rootstock breeding has worked directly on this species. The clonal mahaleb selections, including SL 64 and Pi-Ku 1, give the uniformity that a seedling row cannot, and the hybrid ‘MaxMa Delbard 14’, a cross of mahaleb with sweet cherry, combines the lime tolerance of mahaleb with the vigour control and better anchorage of its other parent. North American programmes produced the Mazzard × Mahaleb series, known as the M × M selections.
Science & Biotechnology
Biotechnology has become part of rootstock production. Prunus has a compact karyotype of eight chromosome pairs, and mahaleb clone lines are checked with microsatellite and other molecular markers so that a nursery can prove a stoolbed really is the clone it claims to be. Micropropagation by axillary shoot culture is routine for clonal lines, and somatic embryogenesis and cryopreservation are used in cherry germplasm collections. The formation of coumarin has also been studied as a model reaction in the phenylpropanoid pathway.
Uses & Benefits
The other use of the plant is culinary and much older than the pipe trade. The hard stones of the ripe fruit are cracked and the kernels dried, then ground to a pale, slightly oily spice sold as mahlab and used across the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. A pinch is kneaded into the dough of festive breads and sweet biscuits, where it gives a bitter-almond, cherry-pit note that survives baking.
The kernel tastes of bitter almond because it contains amygdalin, the cyanogenic glycoside shared with bitter almonds, apricot kernels and peach stones. When the crushed kernel is moistened, an accompanying enzyme releases hydrocyanic acid, which is exactly why the flavour is so insistent and why mahlab is used in small quantities. The same compound sits in the foliage and twigs, protecting the tree from browsing and contributing to the bitterness that makes the fruit itself unpalatable.
In the wild the Mahaleb cherry is a shrub or a small tree of dry, rocky, lime-rich places: garrigue, maquis margins, scrub on limestone screes, old walls and the edges of Mediterranean oak woods. The leaves are small, glossy, oval and finely toothed, on stalks that carry a pair of small red glands near the blade, an extrafloral nectary arrangement shared with the sweet cherry but more prominent here.
The flowers are the tree’s great ornamental gift. They open in upright racemes of several white five-petalled blooms carried on a leafy shoot rather than in the tight bunches of a cultivated cherry, and they are powerfully fragrant, so a tree in blossom can be found by nose from a distance. The fruit that follows is small, round and black, with thin astringent flesh around a smooth stone, and it is taken by birds but not worth eating.
Growing from Seed
Sow the stones in autumn, in a drill two centimetres deep in a light loam over a bed worked deeply, because the seedlings make a long taproot quickly and resent being moved. Thin the seedlings to eight centimetres apart once the second true leaf has opened, keep the row watered through dry spells. Give the stones a warm, moist period followed by the winter cold outdoors to break their dormancy.
Our Take
If you graft, graft onto this tree and onto the wild cherry side by side, and see which one suits your soil. The wild cherry is the other classic understock and better on heavy ground, so Prunus avium is the one to compare it with. The Japanese apricot is grown for a very different crop of its own, and Prunus mume is a good flowering companion for a dry bank where mahaleb already thrives. Add the sloe for a dense, thorny hedge at the foot of the row, since Prunus spinosa takes the same lime and the same neglect.
Related Reading
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