What Is a Spur on a Cherry Tree?

Spurs

• "Spurs" refers to the short sub-twigs on cherry tree branches that produce one or more buds each, and thus give rise to the flowers and fruits for which the trees are celebrated and cultivated. Often only an inch long, the spurs of cherry trees can nonetheless be productive for quite some time. Those of sweet cherries may produce fruit for a decade or more, while those of sour cherries often produce for five years or less. A given sour cherry may sport some fruiting spurs as well as buds developing at the branch tips.

Appearance

• On spur-bearing species, buds appear as wrinkled studs along the twig, giving it a crooked appearance. These flower immediately ahead of or coinciding with leaf-out in much-lauded blooms. In native North American cherry trees in the wild, the flowers tend to be snowy-white in hue, but many cultivars flourish pinkish blooms. Spur flower clusters thus appear as clusters of flashy petals. These develop into glossy, dark-skinned fruits that are technically called "drupes," with a core that is a hard, seed-bearing “stone” surrounded by a fleshy coat.

Rose Family

• Cherry trees belong to the rose family, Rosaceae, which, by David Allen Sibley’s reckoning in his 2009 book “The Sibley Guide to Trees,” contains about 3,000 species. These include such notable and commercially important members as apple and pear, as well as the cherry’s close relatives of the same genus, Prunus: plums and apricots. Among others in the rose family are hawthorns, service berries and other fruiting shrubs and trees of enormous wildlife value. In addition to some of the cherries, spurs are common to certain varieties of plum, apricot, apple and pear.

Maintenance

• To encourage fruitful spurs on cherry trees, horticulturalists prune carefully to ensure those on interior or lower branches aren’t being shaded out by the canopy. Pruning depends on the type of cherry – sweet and sour cherries vary in branch configuration and angle, for example – but may involve such methods as heading back branches to stubs to encourage new spur production.