A small native tree with white spring flowers, edible summer berries, and copper to red fall color.

A fast, suckering native shrub of streambanks and moist thickets across eastern North America, grown for huge flat-topped cymes of tiny lemon-scented white flowers in early summer and the clusters of dark elderberry drupes that follow. Spreads by root suckers into naturalized colonies 5-12 feet tall and wide; the flowers feed butterflies and the showy fruit feeds birds. The raw berries are not eaten fresh — they are cooked into jelly, pie, and wine.

A tough, medium-sized native tree of the eastern and midwestern United States, grown as much for its showy edible orange fruit as for its distinctive thick, dark gray bark broken into rectangular blocks. Small urn-shaped white-to-greenish-yellow flowers open in May and June, and the sweet fruit ripens after frost. Largely dioecious — a female tree needs a male pollinizer nearby to set fruit — and notably drought- and walnut-tolerant once established.

The European wild cherry — also called mazzard or gean — and the parent species behind nearly every sweet cherry cultivar sold for fruit, including Bing. Fragrant white flowers open singly or in 3-5 flowered clusters in spring just before the leaves, followed by small sweet red-to-black cherries in early summer. A deciduous tree of 15-30 feet in cultivation (to 60 feet in the wild); birds and squirrels relish the fruit and have naturalized it from gardens into the wild across eastern and midwestern North America.

The tart 'pie cherry' of the rose family, native to Europe and southwest Asia and grown for cooking, preserving, and baking rather than fresh eating. A small, rounded, spreading deciduous tree — typically 13-20 feet tall and wide — that bears clusters of white spring flowers followed by bright red, acidic drupes in early to midsummer. Unlike the sweet cherry (Prunus avium), most sour cherries are self-fertile, so a single tree will set a crop. The shorter stature, greater cold-hardiness, and self-fertility make it the easier cherry for a home garden.

A rounded, multi-stemmed deciduous shrub native across eastern and central North America, grown for its edible nuts and its season-opening catkins. Showy 2-3 inch yellowish-brown male catkins dangle from bare branches in early spring before the ovate, double-toothed leaves emerge; small egg-shaped edible nuts ripen inside leafy husks by mid- to late summer. Easygoing in average soil and tolerant of clay and black walnut, it suckers into thickets that screen and shelter wildlife.