Most people probably couldn’t tell the difference between an almond tree and a cherry blossom. Since the term “cherry” describes a lot of various species in the Prunus genus, some of which aren’t necessarily any more related to a sakura or sweet cherry than to an almond, apricot or peach is, could it be said that the entire genus of blossoming trees are “cherries” broadly speaking?
no. otherwise we’d be asking if cherries are plums. Almonds, cherries, plums, peaches, apricots, etc. are all drupes.
According to Wiki all of these come under the genus Prunus, with each being classified as its own species. In biology co-generic species are usually quite similar, e.g. zebras and domestic horses; I don’t know about plants but I would expect the same principle to apply there as well.
If you’ve ever had a peach pit split open after you separated the pit from the flesh, you’ll notice that there is something that looks very much like an almond in the center of the pit. I’ve been tempted but was never brave enough to try to eat that thing.
Good call since they contain cyanide.
No, they’re peaches. Same genus, though.
I’m not entirely being facetious. Sweet almonds, bitter almonds, and peaches (including nectarines, which are just peaches with a kind of baldness) all have different species names, because their fruit and seeds have different commercial applications, but biologically, they are strains of the same population.
I don’t know if cherries are at all interfertile with almonds & peaches though.
So do almonds. Peach pits are safe to eat in small quantities. At one time they were actually sold in small packets in UK whole food stores. This stopped after a toddler became ill after eating several such packets.
Hasn’t killed me yet.
And it’s amygdalin, which can release cyanide, but also delicious benzaldehyde. Which is why I cook one cherry dish with the pits in.
Me either. I wonder how close to being identical an almond tree is to a sakura or sweet cherry, genetically. I’m pretty sure they’re far more alike than a human and a chimp. I know species within the same genus can often hybridize. My guess would be you could cross an almond with a cherry but I’m not sure it would be fertile. It may be more of a “mule” tree.
This reminds me of a story.
Once, there was a young woman who wanted to do a little psychological experiment. So she carefully bred cherry trees to bloom in multiple colors, and arranged to have them planted such that the trees of one color would spell out the name of some other color. You know, to test the Stroop effect.
However, the instructions (which were, admittedly, odd) weren’t transmitted to the workers (all starving underpaid grad students) effectively, so the groups of various colored cherry trees were planted such that the colors matched the names, completely invalidating her experiment.
She’s now the Stroop drupe group blooper girl, Stroop drupe blooper girl, Stroop drupe blooper girl…
She now focuses on Anglo-Saxon royalty.
As usual, there is no strict correlation between the common name groupings and the taxonomic ones. Some of the flowering ‘cherry’ varieties, for example, are actually species of plum (or at least that is to say that their fertile, very close relatives bear plum-like fruit.
Nature cares about no such human-imposed categories though. Almonds aren’t cherries, but only really because we have a fairly tight and well established notion of what we mean by ‘almond’.
Nothing can stop her now…
To summarize, plums, cherries, almonds, chokecherries, peaches, nectarines, and doubtless others, are all distnct species in the genus prunus (Latin for plum, I assume, since the French for plum is prune). And they are all in rose family, which includes also apples and pears (distinct genera). The seeds of all these families contain cyanide. However, almonds specifically, have been bred to minimize the amount of that cyanide. An occasional “bitter almond” will be a throwback (or maybe a mutant) that is high in cyanide. Apple seeds contain cyanide too, but in very small amounts.
Well, I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure the almond trees are a lot bigger than the cherry blossoms.
One idiot toddler gets sick and so no one can have it? That’s dumb.
Not that I’d eat that, but I’m just sayin.
I really want to grow one of these: The tree of forty fruits | Sam Van Aken | TEDxManhattan - YouTube
The forty fruit tree is grafted, not hybridized. This means it’s really forty different trees assembled onto one tree which acts as a common trunk and roots.
“Bitter almonds” aren’t just a throwback. They’re a distinct variety. Most sweet almond cultivars (and there are several significant cultivars grown just in the USA) are grafted and cloned on a massive scale. I don’t know how often a sport goes bitter, though maybe it could. Of course, the root stock is very likely something else, like a peach-almond hybrid, and it’s just possible that seeds from that could mix in.
I’ve eaten a raw peach seed once. Very striking and intense flavor.
I was under the impression that bitter almonds were bred for commercial cyanide production, but maybe they never really were; it seems inefficient. Industrial cyanide production largely uses coal and ammonia. Extract of bitter almond seems to have been used medicinally at one time, perhaps on the theory that something that tastes that bad must be good for you.
Most commercial almond extracts IME are from bitter almonds. I think they’re likely solutions of the essential oil rather than proper extracts, since they taste and smell pretty much like benzaldehyde in alcohol, with no hydrogen cyanide odor.
Bananas meet the botanical definition of “berries” – a fleshy fruit produced from a single flower and containing one ovary. So do Pumpkins.