I found one unusual cherry or not-cherry tree on W 37th between Highbury and Wallace. Last year I reported this site as one block of young Akebonos with just one Accolade tree. But this year I realised there are 3 Kanzans and 1 tree which I can't say cherry or not cherry. It has very very tiny flowers as cherry without leaves. (I used a 1 cent coin to compare! They are smaller!) When I saw flowers only, I didn’t think it's cherry, but it has cherry bark! These tiny flowers make umbels with tiny almost nothing pedicels. Perhaps when leaves come out we can say at least cherry or not-cherry.
I think it's probably a rootstock cultivar or perhaps an open pollinated, unnamed seedling that was used for rootstock. Similarly, a sweet cherry in one of my friend's Camano Island, WA orchards is producing suckers with red bark and hairy leaves, pinkish flowers shaped somewhat like those of Prunus x schmittii shown elsewhere on this site. When I grew a whip of the Colt rootstock cultivar for awhile to see what it looked like it produced pendent pink flowers that smelled of melons. So, some mystery trees encountered which look like Japanese flowering cherries may actually be one of these types. When a rootstock has replaced a scion the base (or other point of grafting) of the tree will often be malformed-looking, as is the case with the specimen you have shown.
Almost certainly planted as a rootstock, the scion having since died and been replaced by a sprout from the rootstock.
On July 10, I visited the tree to see leaves and cherries. But I found it was dead completely. It looks like the tree died soon after it bloomed. We could see remains of flowers but there weren't any leaves come out. Now I understand why I didn't notice the tree last year. Last year I thought 37th between Highbury and Wallace was a perfect block of young Akebonos. But now it became not as fair as before. White flowers of Akebono remained me the tree on Larch. The broken limb had white flowers almost a month behind other branches.
