P. serotina: Two adult trees in our yard, several thousand seedlings everywhere. Roughly 99% die in the first year, but that still leaves me with dozens of larger plants that need to be pulled. Fruits disappear before I even see them. Others in our area get heavy infestations of webworms; I wouldn't mind that, so of course mine have none! I'm intending to replace these with trees that are friendly to both wildlife and me!

I think mary liss is our native pin cherry, prunus pensylvanica, you find them in the bush, we have lots up here. If I was you, go with the Evans sour cherry, about 10 X larger berry and make excellent jam. Pick them just before the frost for higher sugar content. [if birds don't get them]. Not sure what you mean by seed rapidly. Evans can stay on the bush if you don't pick them right over winter and dry up..birds will eat some, not messy, nice fall color.

Leftwood, After talking with Bors about these previous experiments at Sask grafting high I found out it applied only to using less than 2 year old pie cherry seedlings as scions. Apparently such seedlings when less than 2 years old grow out of sync. and often winter kill (when left growing that way) where as the more mature bigger trees work in sync. (stop growing soon enough). Using these young scions when grafting high to mature trees makes them change to act more mature... thus the act of grafting high saves tender seedling types from otherwise freezing to death. In light of these facts it now appears that maybe grafting high tender varieties on a hardy rootstock no longer applies the way I used to think because it applies to making seedlings cold hardier which in itself might have nothing to do with how hardy the rootstock your grafting to is... Notice I said might. So I'm going to give it a shot using sweet cherries high on the hardy Amur cherry anyways. Who knows. Grafting on Amur cherry is good anyways for vole prevention. Has anyone seen a moose eat Amur cherry? I havn't. Neither has Dr. Bors seen it. He's tasted them and says the reason must be that the wood is too tart. He's also pulled opened freezers with his hybrid pie cherries inside and says the whole freezer smells really great (ie. compelling to herbivores) as of sweet cherries.

I have choke cherries and I know they sucker extensively, would guess that pin cherries would have a similar growth habit. As for the yellowing leaves, how much rain have you had? It's been extremely dry where I am and I have noticed that one of my chokecherries is already showing color (probably due to drought stress) even though I have watered it a couple of times.