What is the difference between berry and cherry

Most of the sour cherries grown in the United States come from Michigan. Oregon and Washington are the largest producers of sweet cherries. Cherries look like they might be berries. They are soft, sweet and round, and are about the same size as a strawberry. They are often placed next to strawberries in the produce section of your local grocery store.

They are small, sweet and round, as well. On the other hand, cherries have one seed like a peach or plum, possibly making them a fruit. Cherries grow on trees, like peaches and plums, and develop from pink or white flowers that bloom in early spring. This means that the fruit has no core, and is completely edible. Therefore it does not meet the definition of berry. Just as you may have suspected, this category includes peaches, nectarines and plums. So to answer our question: cherries are fruits, and berries are fruits, but cherries are not berries, they are drupes.

So what fruits are berries? Well, cranberries and blueberries are, but would you believe that grapes, tomatoes, papaya, guava, bananas and avocados are also botanically classified as berries? Watermelon and cantaloupes are classified as pepos, or berries with a hard skin. Whether they are fruits or drupes or berries, cherries have long been admired.

Tomatoes, peppers, cranberries, eggplants and kiwis come from a flower with one ovary, and so are also berries, she said. Other plants, such as the strawberry and the raspberry , have flowers with more than one ovary. And those subunits are actually [called] drupes. Each drupe contains a seed; that's why wild raspberries and blackberries are so crunchy, according to Jernstedt. Because these types of fruit consist of so many drupes, they're called aggregate fruit, Jernstedt said.

A strawberry is also an aggregate fruit, but instead of having multiple drupes, it has multiple achenes, the little yellow ovals on the fruit's surface, which each contain a seed.

Oranges are a subtype of berry called hesperidium, said Courtney Weber, a berry breeder at Cornell University in New York. Like other berries, oranges have three fleshy layers , have two or more seeds, and develop from one flower with one ovary.

But citrus fruits contain distinct segments, a property that differentiates these fruits from other berries and gives them the subtype status, Weber said. The number of sections is related to the number of carpels, Jernstedt said. In all, berry categorization "Is kind of chaotic," Jernstedt said.

There are always attempts to impose some order on fruit classification. Traverse City, Michigan is the world's cherry capital, and more than 94 percent of cherries eaten in the United States are grown there.

Other types of drupes include peaches and plums. World View. More From Reference. What Is a Perceptual Region?