Seems Like Just Yesterday that the Sarvisberry Bloomed

I enjoyed reading an ecard quote this week that, "For teachers, the month of August, is just one long Sunday night."  Isn't that what it feels like as the first day of classes approach?

I started looking through my pictures from this summer.  From all the way back in May, I have a picture of serviceberry.  When visiting my brother-in-law he pronounced it very differently.  I thought it was just his Windber twang!  I discovered that his common name was more correct than mine and was spelled differently too, even though it was the same tree.  He called the tree sarvisberry.  I took the picture of this tree in May, long before conversing with my brother-in-law.  On the ride home from Windber, I read about this tree in the book:  Trees of Pennsylvania: and the Northeast by Charles Fergus.  The book is a wonderful way to get to know particular tree species; reading it, I felt like I was getting to know my friends better.

Serviceberry is probably a modification of the older name sarvisberry, which may be a name that settlers gave to the tree because the fruits resembled the Sorbus from their European homes.  Serviceberry on the other hand, has a relevance all its own.  The tree blooms early, about the time that the ground might have thawed enough to bury the dead, several hundred years ago.  The tree is also called shadbush because it blooms at the same time that fish (shad) were migrating up the river.  (And a quick YouTube search, led me to this video that suggests that not only are the fruits edible, a fact that my brother-in-law had told me, but so too are the flowers.)

Today as I reviewed my pictures from May, I felt nostalgia for the early parts of summer.  Here are a couple of my pictures. Ah, to return to the early days of May with the whole stretch of three months of summer ahead of you!

The genus is Amelanchier, and the family is Rosaceae.