Stella is a cultivar of cherry developed in British Columbia, Canada. It is notable as the first self-fertile sweet cherry to be named.
Cultivar history
The Stella variety was the result of a breeding program at the John Innes Institute in Norwich, England. That program developed three self-fertile seedlings, which were used in attempts to breed high-quality self-fertile cherry trees. One of the seedlings was crossed with the Lambert variety at the Summerland Research Station in Summerland, British Columbia in 1956 by K. O. Lapins (namesake of the Lapins cherry cultivar), and the resulting hybrid tree was named "Stella" in 1968. It has since been used to develop other cultivars, including the Chelan cherry.
Tree Characteristic
Amarena cherries, if preserved correctly, are a great balance of sour and sweet. The syrup should retain some of the cherries' acidity without going overly sugary. Still, instead of the cutting sourness of raw fruit, the flavor you get is more complex, starting sweet and only hitting you with sour undertones.
Fruit Characteristics
The fruit of the Stella cultivar is large, heart-shaped, and dark red, with overall excellent quality. It ripens about 1 week earlier than Bing.
Compact Stella
A compact version of Stella was developed through X-ray irradiation of dormant Stella scions in 1964 at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. This semi-dwarf variety of the cultivar grows to about half the size of the parent variety. It retains the parent variety's self-fertility and fruits early and heavily. It was named "Compact Stella" in 1973
