Dig gently at the base of the plant looking for the pit. I've identified a few trees by looking at the pit. A cherry is easy to tell from a peach. But even some cherries might be enough different to tell apart. I can identify some apricots by the pit shape. The pit of a young tree like that may still be hanging on the crown of the plant an inch or two deep.

If you haven't been spraying those cherries at least every two weeks with pesticide, each one will have a little white worm inside by the pit. At least that's what happens here in Utah and many other places. I just harvested my first really good crop from my Lapins cherry trees, and they're wonderful! But because I only sprayed once about a month ago (it's been a very busy spring with a new baby in the family and a big vacation a few weeks ago!) about 10% of my cherries have worms. So, we're cutting most of them open before we eat them and discarding the wormy ones. But since nothing beats that great feeling of popping a whole cherry in your mouth and letting the juice squirt all over your tongue, I can't resist just eating some of them without checking! A little worm won't kill me, I suppose! But anyway, I'm not sure you really want a tree that's half Kwanzan and half wild cherry! I'd probably cut off the wild branches and buy a new cherry tree to plant somewhere else nearby. I do have a related question, though: I have four Kwanzans and one is nearly dead. From what I've observed in my garden, the ones getting less water are healthier. They're in an area with a gravel mulch and they only get water from a drip system. The one dying is in an area that is sprinkled with a groundcover around it. Is that your observation -- that these trees are sensitive to watering and like to be a little dry? Also, my dying one has suddenly shot out a bunch of suckers at the base -- so, should I be pretty certain it's on wild cherry rootstock? Would that look attractive as a shrubby, multi-trunked tree if I let these suckers grow and cut out the mostly dead Kwanzan from the middle of the clump?

I'm trying 'Danube' and 'Kristin' in my garden. One is a sour cherry and one is a sweet Cherry. Keep in mind that those classifications are just general terms. Two different species, cerasus and avium. The sour cherry species does better here but there are plenty of problems even getting them to perform. There are sour cherries that are sweet and sweet cherries that are sour (I know, it's confusing and made worse by catalogs that don't include the species name). Lots of people in climates similar to ours have had good crops off of some of the newer varieties. 'Northstar' is supposed to be the best for Raleigh but my tree died while still young (it did produce full sized fruit the year it died!). The trees I have now are healthy and growing just fine but are too small and young to gauge how well they will do here yet.

Iseltzer: We have jap beatles all around me yet luckily so far, they are not in big numbers where I am at. 30 miles away they are horrendous so I suppose some day they will be a problem for me. I grow grapes too so I hope they stay away. When they come, I will try carbaryl since I heard it is supposed to work great on jap beatles. I grow tart cherries too and find I must net at the first sign of pink on the fruits. If you wait a few days longer, it will be amazing how much of the crop just vanishes to birds. Even with a net I got one crafty robin who always walked around the tree every morning and finally found some way in. Very hard to remove the birds once inside the netting. Thankfully I only had that happen twice. Never did find any opening how it got in. My biggest pest with cherries is birds. I do spray for curculio, cherry fruit fly, cherry leaf spot (if and when it happens). I do not spray once the tree is netted so I have had an outbreak or two of powdery mildew if we get very cloudy and rainy weather for a long period at this stage but it was only bad once and more so on some varieties than others. Cuculio season here runs potentially from petal fall to about mid-June. Just before I net, I like to spray one last time at the first sign of pink on any fruit and that seems to do the trick for me (only found one larvae in all the fruit I picked and pitted over the years). If I get leafspot, I will spray chlorothalonil AFTER harvest as not cleared for cherries after shuck-split stage in spring. Not a huge issue so far except for one year and again definite differences in susceptibility based on variety. Most of this pertains to my tart cherries since I have only tried growing sweets the past few years. I do not think they will be much different that the tarts as far as birds,insects and disease issues except that I avoid using Imidan insecticide on the sweets due to phytotoxicity.