Prunus is one of the great sprawling genera of the temperate world, holding the cherries, plums, apricots, almonds, and the evergreen laurel cherries inside a single botanical family argument. What the group shares is a five-petalled flower of disarming simplicity and a stone fruit at the end of the season. What the group does not share is a calendar: Prunus mume, the Japanese flowering apricot, opens spice-scented flowers in the thin light of January, while the native plums wait for the first warm week of spring and the laurel cherries bloom quietly under evergreen leaves.

For Southern gardens the useful split is between the flowering kinds and the working ones. Prunus mume 'Peggy Clarke' and the dwarf Prunus incisa 'Kojo no mai' are grown for the flowers and for the branch structure that carries them; Prunus americana, Prunus angustifolia, and the hog plum Prunus umbellata are thicket-forming natives that feed birds and carry a fruit worth a jelly; Prunus caroliniana and Prunus lusitanica are dense broadleaf evergreens for screening and clipping. One honest caution runs across the genus: leaves and stones carry cyanogenic compounds, so keep prunings well away from livestock.