The cherry on top

Decked in perfect blossom, the cherry is the 'loveliest of trees' but ensuring a good crop of its prized fruit is a true labour of love for British producers

- Written by Gabriel Stone

TINKER, TAILOR, soldier, sailor...' The cherry delightfully permeates not just this nation's plates but our culture. When British winter drags interminably, the early-flowering cherry feels laden with perfect blossom and cheering metaphor. And what better way to mark this country's sweet yet all-too-fleeting, rain-shadowed summer than a triumphant bowl of ripe, fresh cherries?

It is no coincidence that AE Housman, popular poet of the English countryside, shares his Ludlow burial place with a cherry tree. In A Shropshire Lad he memorably captures its unrivalled beauty and weighty symbolism:

'Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide.'

Beauty, purity and death are just the start. For millennia, artists worldwide have deployed the cherry not only for its aesthetic appeal but also as a vivid representation of our own vices and virtues. This is a fruit whose highly charged symbolism manages to span the extremes of human nature. Titian's Madonna of the Cherries, a study of virginity and the sacred blood of Christ, is a world away from Manet's provocative Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, whose basket of spilled cherries chimes with the sensual decadence of this rather racy French picnic.