"Summer Snow Tree" in Pennsylvania

This tree is growing in Pennsylvania in a friend's yard, and she would like help identifying it. She gave me permission to post her pics of it:




my friend's snow tree ( photo / image / picture from AAnightowl's Garden )

The leaves and berries.






'snow tree', view 2 ( photo / image / picture from AAnightowl's Garden )

The bark and more berries.






seed pods from 'snow tree' ( photo / image / picture from AAnightowl's Garden )

The seed pods. She says she has never seen flowers on it, so they must be very small. She says the tree is much taller than her two story home, perhaps "100 ft tall" , but she says she is not good at telling how tall.

thanks.

 

Well, I was convinced this was a Chokecherry or Black Cherry until the last photo of the "snow", now I'm not sure! Are you SURE this came off the same tree?

 

Maybe what we are looking at is molding fruit. Is that possible?

 

My friend says this comes off the same tree. I thought some kind of cherry until I saw the seed pods and their fluff. No, it is not mold. I also thought cottonwood at first, but the leaves are way different and she knows cottonwood trees from living in the south for a number of years. I will be browsing my "A Field Guide To Trees And Shrubs" by Petrides to see if I can find anything also.


summer snow berries and seeds/pods ( photo / image / picture from AAnightowl's Garden )

berries and seeds/pods from "summer snow tree". That is what my friend calls it because she does not know what it really is.

 

I decided to research this a little, but I still think this is a cherry tree. A black cherry tree. Not the kind of black cherry we think of in the bing cherry type, though. The wild black cherry tree. I found this site so I c/pasted for you to see the difference in the fruit structure between the choke cherry/black cherry and pin cherry.
http://extension.unh.edu/resources/file ... ep2400.pdf

 

The fruit does look like cherries, but I have never seen any kind of cherries make this kind of seeds/pod.

The bark is wrong for cherry species [at least the ones I know, and Cherries have an inside pit]. Cherry trees have reddish bark with crosswise striping.

The webpage was interesting, but did not mention what kinds of seeds these cherries have.

 

Maybe a Cottonwood? Something in the Populus family.

Populus trichocarpa (Black Cottonwood, Western Balsam Poplar or California Poplar)

 

I looked up cottonwoods, and none of the leaves matched the ones that I found.