growing any hybrid from seed is tricky - depending on how many traits were being bred for, you can have as low as 1:16 chance of having any one seed be like the parent plant -

so the oldest heirlooms, the ones with the least tampering, would be your best bet - but I think this is why most of the cherry trees sold are sold as rooted plants.

If you have space for several trees and time to wait and see what you get, go ahead and start some seeds and grow them out.

You might not get cherries like the parent, but you'll get something. Maybe you'll get something nice enough to be a new named variety.

There are cherry trees and apple trees along the highways in Oregon, where drivers have thrown pits and apple cores out the window of the car. You do get a tree from the seeds.

One reason that fruit trees are grafted is that it cuts down the time before there is fruit. The wood grafted onto the rootstock is mature wood.

If you grow from seed, the wood has to grow through the juvenile stages and mature before it is old enough to bear fruit. So you will have to be patient. It will be years before you learn what you get from your seed grown trees.

It's possible that Nanking cherries can be grown from seed. I don't know the answer to that one. Someone on the fruit forum might know.

This is an excellent question, and not enough people are investigating fruit lineages that can be grown from seed and still perform well consistently, at least not with temperate fruits.

Cristobalina is supposedly a heirloom variety cherry, though I am not entirely sure if that means you can take the seeds and get something like the parent, or whether that is just referring to the fact that this variety has been around a long time (in Spain).

I have long suspected we have come to have an overreliance on clonal propagation, and all these cherries are not really 'natural' if they cannot be propagated from seed without failing to produce decent quality fruit.

This does not mean it cannot be done though. Reading back through an old thread, there was one member in this forum who had a large old cherry tree on her property that was believed to have originally been grown from seed. The cherries were good quality, and she said that there were some researchers and fruit breeders that were very interested in the tree and offered her money to take cuttings. Own-root sweet cherry trees tend to be larger and have a much thicker trunk, like a real tree. They can also live much longer. And most cherries grown from cuttings are generally grafted onto a different rootstock. So seeing a huge 70+ year old cherry tree is a strong indication that it was grown from seed. Especially if the fruit does not seem to have quite the same qualities as any of the common varieties.

As with many varieties of fruit, offspring produced from seed can have very different traits than their parents. (one classic example, Rainier Cherries, which are yellowish, were produced by a cross between Bing and Vans, which are both deep red colored)

People on family farms did sometimes plant cherry tree seeds, but I would imagine the resulting trees that produced fruit with less desirable traits were likely to get the axe. It also takes longer for own-root trees to start producing fruit, so you can see why seed-grown sweet cherries were never used commercially.