Crabapple (Malus) Prunus (Plum, in this case) The purpleleaf plum does not look to me to be P. x cistena but rather another kind. If you keep to grow larger time will tell. Perhaps birds or squirrels have planted these two trees there.

when i was first learning ... there was no WWWeb ... i left everything for my MI winter ... and then in spring ... cut back to live tissue ... which was usually below snow cover ... it was the only way to insure that the catch 22 you mention ... how would i know.. i wasnt cutting off the only part that might live ... and 30 years later ... i still use that system ... i do not keep a retentive garden .. i revel in what a plant looks like dormant.. and in winter.. else i would just have a flat garden to look at all winter ... and half the time.. i never make it out there in spring to clean it all up ... what lives.. lives.. what doesnt doesnt.. and i dont really worry about it ... if it wants to die ... so be it... i didnt want it anyway .. lol .. yes.. you can spend hundreds of hours.. researching every know plant by name ... and cutting them all down ... but for me.. gardening is about turning off the technology.. and intuiting it all .. and enjoying being out in mother nature ... not going blind reading up on the computer ... buying zone appropriate plants.. and relying on ma nature to provide said zone.. is about all i do ... and though i may think about things all winter long... i dont worry about it all ... and it only took me 20 years to get to that point.. lol ... what one might call.. zen gardening .. [she really screwed with us last winter.. and sent us a z4 winter .. in my z5 ... lots and lots of damage.. oh well .. what can you do.. would worry have made a difference????] good luck ken

Even with zone-pushing, I think a sweet cherry in zone 3/4 would be a short-lived novelty. When I was younger I saw them planted in zone 5, and they did produce 10 or fewer cherries for a few years, then a hard winter would kill off the tree. I live in zone 3 now and I have grown Nanking cherries. The fruit is rather small, seedy and okay to eat but is watery and has little flavor. A novelty, I'd get rid of it if you are looking for cherry production. A better option is one of the "sour" or "tart" cherries. These are the cherries used for pie-fillings and processed cherry deserts. They are much hardier than sweet cherries and produce full-sized cherries, although I would again describe them as "okay to eat, but kind of watery and not a lot of flavor". They are semi-hardy in zone 3 -- a winter low of -30F (-35C) might do some minor damage to the plants, but -40F (-40C) could cause serious damage that the trees would survive, but it might take them a year or two to recover from. These are cherries such as Meteor, North Star, Montmorency, and Evans (Evans is sold in the U.S. as "Bali"). Evans (Bali) is the most productive and perhaps the hardiest of the sour cherries, hey it has survived in Edmonton Alberta for almost 100 years, so has seen lots of -40 winter lows. Better yet are the cherries now being released from the breeding program at the University of Saskatchewan. They have been developing a number of cherry cultivars that can tolerate Canadian prairie winter temperatures of -50F (-45C), on an upright bush that grows 6-8 feet high and produces "sour" cherries that have as much or more sugar than sweet cherries such as "Bing", though they still retain higher acidity than "sweet" cherries such as Bing, Ranier or Lapin. I bought 4 of the newly released U of Sask. varieties this spring, but they are still very hard to locate even on the Canadian prairies, and they may not yet be available in the U.S. or in Canada outside of the Canadian prairies. Here's a link to the breedng program at the U of Sask., so you can follow up... http://www.fruit.usask.ca/dwarfsourcherries.html

Under my cherry trees I grow a hedge that is mixed in foliage color and texture & height. I doubt that any of the hedge gets as little as an hour but I have had very good luck with: Aucuba japonica, nandina, alleghany viburnum, pragense (sp) viburnum, Diana Rose of sharon. I also grow Schip laurel, otto luykens laurel, euonymous silver knight in shade and several kinds of holly. The problems I have had are as much about dry as about shady. I have mixed in shade perennials like hosta, verigated solomon seal, ferns of various colorations. Bulbs and pansies for late winter and spring. I noticed acorus had self seeded into the darkest part of it. Lovely verigated foliage with red berries much of the year. I even grew some smaller japanese maples that provided fall color, although they are now so big that I had to move them out. Some japanese maples are 4-8 feet and can give you a range of colors for spring and fall In short, there are so many things going on in that hedge that the last thing anyone notices is that it is mainly green. The main thing I would do differently would be to combat the dryness when I started the whole thing. I really regret not having trucked in a few cubic yards of leaf mold, which the city sells for $15 yard delivered, when I started this to make the soil much more water retentive.