Talk:Prunus sargentii

Edible?

Are the fruits edible? Badagnani (talk) 18:31, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Nope. Article says "ornamental".imars (talk) 07:03, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

Let's get a little bit more detail (and sourcing) emphatically stating that the fruits are inedible to humans. Badagnani (talk) 07:12, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

You have a point. In the sources listed I could not find a reference to the term ornamental (though the one source recommended the tree be used as a street tree). I did a little more looking and found two other sources that list the tree as being ornamental and a description of the fruit. The description of the fruit shows that the fruit can be eaten by birds. Putting the shoe on the other foot. I have found no source to suggest that the fruit can be eaten by humans. So we have neither a negative, nor a positive. However, the tree certainly is not cultivated for its fruit. That much is clear.imars (talk) 06:56, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

My city is covered with ornamental crabapples. I tried eating them a few times but they don't taste very good. However, I think with a lot of sugar I could possibly make a pie or jam or something out of them. So, one could say that they're not poisonous, and taste very tart, but are still edible. That's what I'm thinking might be the case for some of these ornamental cherries. Badagnani (talk) 08:04, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

I agree that it may be true of ornamental cherries like this one, too. But I think it would be wise to err on the side of caution. I would not want anyone to get sick eating sarget cherries, because they read that they are edible here in the wikipedia article.

Deleted dubious names "Big mountain cherry" and "Ezo mountain cherry"

Until Jan 2013, "Ezo Mountain cherry (蝦夷山桜, Ezo-yama-zakura) or big mountain cherry (大山桜, Ō-yama-zakura)" was listed as a common name, but the use of these names as an English common name was dubious, so I deleted it. It was inserted by the creator of this article[1] in Jun 2008.

I couldn't find any reliable websites which use this name, and layman uses are not so many, either; "big mountain cherry" was rare, and googling for «"ezo mountain tree" -wiki» hit only less than 110 pages. (Google first reported 39,400, but don't trust it. Go to the 11th page, and you're done.) In any cases, any don't date back to 2007. You can say the latter is actually used, but it's not many either. It's better to stop spreading dubious information.

A page in "TAXA Wood Knowledge Base" looks reliable, but it may have copied Wikipedia. The identical copy of the line "native to Japan, Korea, and Sakhalin (Russia)", seen e.g. in [2] is there, and in particular, notice the last "(Russia)". The site top says it uses the web as a source.

Maybe the contributor meant them as literal translations of the Japanese name, but if so, the description was misleading.--Ahora (talk) 11:23, 7 January 2013 (UTC)