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Help with Buying Cherry Trees

Your cherry trees will be providing you with delicious fruit for many years to come: we want to make sure you choose the right trees for your garden.

Think about the size & shape of Cherry tree for your garden:

Your available space will determine the shape of tree that you can grow. There are 2 main options:

  1. Fan Trained Cherry Trees:
    This space-saving shape is grown flat against walls or fences with horizontal wires for support.
    To make a fan cherry tree, you need to buy a Maiden sized tree (this is the smallest you can buy) and prune it into the desired shape.

  2. Free Standing Cherry Trees:
    These two sizes take up more room and give the biggest crops:
  • Bush Cherry trees: This is a short tree with a main trunk about 1 metre tall and a final height of about 3 metres - great for most people's gardens and easy to harvest.
  • Half standard Cherry trees: A "proper" tree that will reach about 5 metres tall.
    You will need a big, secure ladder to harvest your trees when they are full-grown.

    You can buy maiden, bush and half-standard cherry trees from us.

Which Starting Size of Tree Should You Buy?

Maidens: These are the cheapest option and can be trained into any shape you like. If you want a fan, you must start with a maiden.

Bushes & Half-Standards: These are the largest starting sizes you can order: go for a half-standard if you have plenty of room or a bush if space is tight.

Sweet or Sour Cherries?

Well, we would say that the answer is both!
Sweet cherries are for eating fresh off the tree, while acid or sour cherries are for cooking, baking into pies and making jam.
We only grow one sour cherry, the world famous English Morello. Not only is it the best, it is also very hardy and suitable for growing all over the UK.

Cherry Tree Pollination

The sour Morello cherry and some of the sweet varieties are are self-fertile.
  • If you only have room for one cherry tree, choose a self fertile one.

    More than half of our sweet cherry varieties are not self fertile and must be pollinated by a compatible tree to bear fruit - this includes all of the early fruiting trees.
  • You can choose cherry pollination partners here.

    • Harvesting Cherry Trees

    Cherry trees as a group have quite a short season, ranging from late June to August.
    Cherries don't store well and need to be eaten, cooked, preserved as jam or frozen without delay when they are ripe.
    If fresh cherries for your kitchen all summer is your dream, it is best to choose at least 3 types of cherry tree to cover the whole season:

    Harvest Time Trees
    Early
    (Late June-Mid July)    		 Amber Heart, Early Rivers
    Mid
    (Through July)    		 Knight's Early Black, Merton Glory, Merton Bigarreau, Lapins Cherokee, Kordia
    Late
    (Late July-August)    		 Van, Colney, Bigarreau Napoleon, Penny, Skeena, Stella, Summer Sun, Sunburst, Morello (Sour Cherry)
    Very Late
    (From Early August)    		 Sweetheart

    This information is also on the cherry pollination chart.

    Planting Cherry Trees

    Your trees need good soil drainage and will suffer in heavy clay areas that trap water: heavy clay itself is fine, as long as it is on a hill or slope that sheds water well.
    The more sun your trees get, the better your crops will be.
    If your soil is poor, the effort you spend digging in lots of manure and compost as deep as you can will reward you with healthy trees and good crops for many years to come.

    Rootstocks:
    Cherry trees, like all named edible fruit trees, are cloned by taking cuttings from an adult tree and grafting them onto a rootstock from another tree.
    We use Colt rootstocks, which are as close as it gets to being universal.
    They are fine for growing your trees as a wire-trained fan and if you want a full sized tree, it will reach 4-5 metres.

    Our 1 Year Guarantee:
    Many people have reservations about buying plants online, especially bareroot plants, since it is hard to tell if they are alive when they arrive with no leaves in winter!

    Our guarantee to you goes well beyond the basic legal requirements of selling perishable goods by mail order:

    If you are not happy with your plants after inspecting them upon arrival, we will either refund you or replace them (we will refund the sending delivery charge but you will pay the return charge).

    If you buy & plant a bareroot tree in winter, we will replace (not refund) it if it dies within a year after you receive it.

    You must send us good quality photos of the entire plant, both close up and with the surrounding area in shot.

    We will replace the trees free of charge: we will only charge you for delivery.

    Pricing:
    We can keep our prices low because we only sell by mail order and our nursery is closed to the public.
    Every tree has discounts on larger orders beginning when you buy only 3 of a particular tree.
    Discounts only apply to each individual, named variety of tree: if you buy 3 different trees, you get no discount.

    Delivery information:

    The planting and delivery season for bareroot cherry trees is between November and March.

    A limited range of potted cherry trees is available for the rest of the year - these are delivered in pots but will need to be planted out.

    You can place your order for bareroot cherry trees at any time of year and choose a winter delivery date that suits you.

    Whenever you place your order, you will not charge you until your plants are ready to be shipped.

    You will receive a reminder e-mail to notify you of the delivery date,

    When they are delivered, we use a 24 hour courier service to get your cherry trees to you in top condition.

    Please contact us if you have any questions or suggestions.

    Browse all of our Cherry Trees for Sale here.

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