SERVICEBERRY

"Before other trees have even begun to properly put on their leaves, the shadbush blooms in the woods and along rivers and streams. Its sparse, dainty flower clusters, which hang like scraps of lace from the bare branches, are one of the earliest signs of spring in the North, and so they lift the heart. There is a sadness about the shadbush bloom, however, to those who know its story, for the tree is a kind of widow.




Shadbush is a small tree whose delicate flowers look a little like cherry blossoms, only thinner and less abundant. So early does this tree bring forth its blossoms that the first settlers noticed their appearance around the time the shad began to run. Shad are a foot-long silvery fish that look like a herring and live like a salmon, leaving the sea each spring to swim up rivers to reproduce. They were an essential item of food to the New England colonists and their successors, for whom the shad run might mean deliverance from starvation at the end of a long winter. Hence their name for the pretty little tree whose bloom coincided with the shad's annual return.

Now, of course, the rivers are dammed and otherwise developed and can hardly be negotiated by seagoing fish. The shad are gone, or pretty much so. The shadbush, however, remains along riverbanks, where it goes on flowering every spring to welcome a return that won't take place. The tree and the fish, like sundered lovers in an old tale, continue in their devotion though they are divided."


The Old Farmer's 2000 Almanac