June Berry, one of the common names for amelanchier Canadensis, a rosaceous shrub or small tree, which botanically differs from py-rus, the genus of the apple and pear, only in the number of cells in the fruit. This species is found as far north as Hudson bay, and extends throughout the United States; running through such a wide geographical range, it presents a great variety of forms; more than a dozen species were described by the early botanists, but Torrey and Gray, in their "Flora of North America," very properly reduced all these to a single polymorphous species, of which there are half a dozen forms sufficiently marked to be regarded as varieties. These differ in stature, in the shape and pubescence of the leaves, size of petals, and size and abundance of the fruit. A mountain variety, pumila, is only 3 or 4 ft. high, while the variety botrya-pium reaches 30 ft. in height. The leaves in all are simple, heart-shaped, or oval, with white flowers in pendulous racemes, which appear just as the leaves are opening. In some parts of the country the different varieties are known as shad flower or shad bush, as the flowers appear at the time the shad ascends the streams, and also as service berry. The fruit is globular or pear-shaped, the size of a large pea, purplish, sweet and edible.

From the character of the fruit the bush is known in some localities as the sugar pear, but more generally, from the time of its ripening, as June berry. Some plants produce fruit abundantly, which is mostly eaten by birds. The dwarf variety has been brought into cultivation in some of the western states as a market fruit, and is there known as "mountain whortleberry;" it has been tried by amateurs at the east, who find that the birds reap the harvest. All forms of the species are worthy of cultivation as ornamental trees or shrubs, on account of their early and abundant flowering; a well formed specimen, completely sheeted with white, is not exceeded in beauty by any exotic. There is a European species, known in Savoy as amelancier, from which the name of the genus is derived.