Prunus laurocerasus—The Shrub You See but Don’t Notice
Prunus laurocerasus—Cherry Laurel
I didn’t set out to write an abecedarium of boring shrubs, but here we are: Arborvitae, Boxwood, Cherry Laurel. I had wanted to write about Nandina this week, which is actually a landscape shrub that I adore, but I kept not getting around to it. Cherry Laurel is one of those plants that’s everywhere, yet no one really notices it. It is, if possible, even more overlooked than arborvitae and boxwood.
You’ve seen it. Everyone in the Pacific Northwest has. It’s that dense, evergreen shrub lining drive-throughs and parking lots—tough enough to ignore, tidy enough to trim. In private yards, it screens out the road. In commercial settings, it disappears entirely. Like arborvitae and boxwood, it’s a plant meant to blend into the background.
There are two plants in the United States that go by the common name Cherry Laurel. One is the native Prunus caroliniana, which is common in the Southeast. The one we have here in Tacoma is Prunus laurocerasus, which is native from Southeast Europe into Iran (Prunus Laurocerasus L. | Plants of the World Online). It also seems to be making a strong case for its common name, as Prunus is Latin for cherry or plum, and laurocerasus combines the Latin words for laurel and cherry(Prunus Laurocerasus “Otto Luyken”). We get it, it’s a cherry tree with laurel-looking leaves. The laurel that it looks like is Laurus nobilis, the Bay Laurel, which provides leaves for cooking and leafy branches for victory wreaths. Apparently P. laurocerasus leaves look enough like L. nobilis leaves that they have become the go-to replacement for wreath-making in the UK (Mabberly, 2017).
It may not actually be a laurel, but it is a cherry! The genus Prunus is a massive one, over two hundred species, many of which are edible fruit species (Byng, 2014). This genus includes cherries, plums, apricots and almonds. All of these fruits contain small amounts of cyanide, usually in the pits, and Cherry Laurel is no exception. It’s terrifying to see the mixed messages about edibility in the foraging sites online, with some saying that it’s technically edible, just don’t eat the particularly bitter fruits, and others advising to steer clear entirely. I will be steering clear. Why bother with cherry laurel when proper cherries exist?
References:
Byng, J. W. (2014). Flowering Plants Handbook (1st ed.). Plant Gateway Ltd.
Mabberly, D. (2017). Mabberly’s Plant Book (Fourth). Cambridge University Press.
Prunus laurocerasus L. | Plants of the World Online | Kew Science. (n.d.). Plants of the World Online. Retrieved May 20, 2025, from http://powo.science.kew.org/taxon/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:324745-2
Prunus laurocerasus “Otto Luyken” (Cherry Laurel, English Laurel, Otto Luyken Cherry Laurel, Otto Luyken’s Laurel, Versailles Laurel) | North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox. (n.d.). Retrieved May 20, 2025, from https://plants.ces.ncsu.edu/plants/prunus-laurocerasus-otto-luyken/
