School is out for the summer on Friday, and it's time for kids to hit the streets. I'm looking forward to spending some of that time on the streets with my kids looking at the trees and figuring out where and when to go to pick fruits and berries.

One help to identifying trees is getting a good field guide. I'm hoping by the end of the summer that I'll be able to teach a street trees version of a local "woody plants" class. Here's a start, complete with scientific names, as a guide to some notable edibles.

Amelanchier: the serviceberry family

I've already covered juneberries and Linda Diane Feldt wrote about serviceberries. These are both the same thing, a variety of Amelanchier arborea.

A kid should know where these trees are downtown, how to identify ripe berries and that the fruit shape is called a pome. When they start to get ripe, it's time for school to let out.

Morus: the red mulberry

The black and red splotches on the sidewalk are a sure sign of summer and that mulberries are ripe. Morus rubra is the red mulberry, native to the eastern U.S. Mulberries are suddenly ripe, Linda Diane Feldt noted on June 7; sometimes they don't appear until later, and they generally stay ripe relatively long.

A kid should know every mulberry tree in the neighborhood, what a sour mulberry tastes like, what an overripe mulberry looks like and why these are called Morus rubra and not Morus alba.

Malus domestica: apple

Vendors bring many named varieties of apples to the Ann Arbor Farmers Market and to other farmers markets throughout the area. Malus domestica grows well in Washtenaw County, with farms and cider mills in all directions from Ann Arbor and old orchards scattered through town.

A kid should know the names of a dozen apple varieties and have strong preferences for what they like to eat fresh. They should know how much a peck is, and be able to put together an applesauce recipe in seconds that works.

Prunus: plums, cherries, peaches and apricots

The prunus family includes plums (Prunus prunus), peaches (Prunus persica), and apricots (Prunus armeniaca). Cherries of many varieties are in the Prunus family as well.

A kid should know where and when to go for U-Pick cherries in the area. They should also know just enough Michigan geography to explain why cherries grow well near Traverse City and not so well near Alpena.

References and links

The best reference for Michigan trees is the book Michigan Trees:, A Guide to the Trees of the Great Lakes Region, by Burton V. Barnes and Warren H. Wagner Jr. and published by the University of Michigan Press. The book has been published in a series of editions since 1913, and it includes a key to each tree found in the state and clear and compact descriptions of how to identify each one.

The original 1913 edition was distributed extremely widely. A copy was sent to every high school in the state, and a principal could request four more. Any nature study club or public library could get a free copy on request, and every citizen of the State of Michigan would be sent a free copy upon request until the edition ran out. Citizens of other states could get a copy for a quarter.

Google has digitized this old edition of the work, which is now in the public domain. I've uploaded it to the Ann Arbor Area Government Documents Library, as Michigan Trees (Otis) 1913; it's about a 10 megabyte PDF, suitable for carrying with you into the woods if you have a mobile device that can display PDFs at suitable resolution, or for paging through online.

The introduction to this edition is by George Plumer Burns. Burns was the director of the Botanical Garden and Arboretum, and Burns Park in Ann Arbor is named after him. James Dickson wrote about Pioneer High School junior Emma Hamstra's project on the history of Burns Park; this is one more piece of that puzzle.

Edward Vielmetti walks through the urban forest for AnnArbor.com. Contact him at edwardvielmetti@annarbor.com.