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Cherry Plum – Form and Function

This is very much a remedy of light and dark and if we look at the tree in flower in the early spring that is what we see: the intense white blossoms clustered on the black branches, with only the bright beginnings of green leaf buds. Cherry Plum, Prunus cerasifera, is the first white blossom of the year coming before pear, cherry or other fruits, earlier than the blackthorn sloe. It is a slender, small tree with slightly drooping branches, of no great physical strength, even weak in appearance. There are often several stems in the trunk as though several trees are growing together, like multiple ‘I’ forms. The single upright trunk of Oak or Elm betokens a clear and strong individuality, by contrast. It is expressly the problem of Cherry Plum that this individual integrity has been breached. The same thing is to be seen in the bark which is smooth and speckled without clear energetic structure lines. The strength of the gesture is to be found in the brilliant and exuberant flowering, not in the structure of the trunk and branches. The tree is alight with the blaze of the spirit. It shines into the darker recesses of our mind, clearing and ordering our mental confusion…. With the Cherry Plum state there is a pressure from the non-physical world that distorts our normal boundaries, breaking through the controls that would otherwise bring certainty in the process of life. We are right to be afraid.