Prunus domestica (European plum); Prunus salicina (Japanese plum); Prunus mume (ume, Chinese plum); Prunus cerasifera (cherry plum)
Origin: South Caucasus and Caspian basin (European plum, <em>Prunus domestica</em>, and cherry plum, <em>Prunus cerasifera</em>); the Yangtze basin of China (ume, <em>Prunus mume</em>, and Japanese plum, <em>Prunus salicina</em>)
The plum is not one fruit but four, domesticated independently at the two opposite ends of the temperate Old World, and the word 'plum' conceals this multiplicity in a single deceptively simple syllable. The genus Prunus, which also gives the world the cherry, the peach, the apricot, and the almond, scattered its plum-bearing species across Eurasia, and human beings took up at least four of them.
The European plum, Prunus domestica, is the great plum of the West, and it is a botanical curiosity: a hexaploid carrying six sets of chromosomes, almost certainly the offspring of a natural cross between the diploid cherry plum (Prunus cerasifera) and the tetraploid blackthorn or sloe (Prunus spinosa). This hybridisation is thought to have occurred in the South Caucasus and the lands south of the Caspian Sea, where the wild ranges of both parents overlap, and where the resulting fertile hexaploid was taken into cultivation perhaps four thousand years ago. From this single species descend an astonishing range of cultivated forms: the prune plums or pruneaux that dry without fermenting around the stone; the damsons (subspecies insititia), small, tart, and intensely flavoured; the green-gold gages, of which the greengage is the most celebrated; the golden mirabelles of Lorraine; and the blue-black quetsches and zwetschgen of Central Europe.
The cherry plum, Prunus cerasifera, is the smaller, tarter cousin, native to the same Caucasian and Central Asian arc, and it is the sour plum of the Georgian and Persian kitchen: gathered green and unripe, it is the soul of sauces and stews rather than a fruit for the hand.
At the far eastern edge of the genus's range, in the warm, wet basin of the Yangtze, the Chinese domesticated two more. Prunus mume, called mei in Chinese and ume in Japanese and usually rendered into English as the apricot-plum or Japanese apricot, is botanically nearer the apricot but culturally and culinarily a plum; it has been cultivated in China for well over three thousand years, grown as much for its blossom as for its hard, sour, golden fruit, which is never eaten fresh but salted, smoked, or steeped. Prunus salicina, the Japanese plum, despite its English name also originated in China; carried first to Japan and then, in the nineteenth century, to California, it became the large, juicy, round dessert plum that dominates the world's fresh-fruit trade today. Four species, two cradles, and a single English word: the plum is, more than almost any other fruit, a lesson in how geography hides inside a name.
The plum travelled in two great streams that did not meet until the nineteenth century, when they finally converged in California.
The western stream began in the Caucasus. The cherry plum and the early European plum spread south and west into the kitchens of antiquity: into Georgia, where the green sour plum became tkemali; into Persia, where the sour plum, the alu, became the defining note of the meat stew; and to Damascus, whose orchards gave their name to the damson, the 'plum of Damascus', that Roman soldiers and merchants carried back across the Mediterranean. Rome received the plum enthusiastically. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century, marvelled at the 'great crowd of plums' (ingens turba prunorum) already in cultivation, and the prune entered Roman cookery as a sweet-sour foil to pork and game, a pairing recorded in the recipes attributed to Apicius. From Rome the European plum spread northward into Frankish and Germanic Europe, where it found its true heartland. Across a broad belt running from Lorraine and the Rhine through Bohemia, Austria, Hungary, Poland, and down into Serbia and the Balkans, the plum became the most important orchard fruit of the common people: dried for winter, boiled down to the dark, sugarless butter the Germans call Pflaumenmus and the Slavs povidl or pekmez, distilled into slivovitz and pálinka, and folded into dumplings, cakes, and preserves. Serbia and its neighbours remain, to this day, amongst the greatest plum-growing nations on earth. A separate Crusader-era branch carried a particular prune plum from Syria to the monks of Gascony, founding the prune d'Agen; another carried the cherry plum and the dried alu eastward along the Silk Road to Bukhara, whose name still rides on the 'alu Bukhara' of the Afghan, Pakistani, and North Indian kitchen. The Arab Mediterranean carried the prune westward to Morocco, where it sweetened the lamb tagine, and the gages and damsons crossed the Channel to England, where Sir Thomas Gage gave his name to the greengage around 1724.
The eastern stream began in the Yangtze. The ume spread from China to Korea, where it became maesil, and to Nara Japan around the eighth century, carried with Buddhism; there, salted and sun-dried, it became umeboshi, the sour, scarlet pickle at the heart of the Japanese table, and, steeped in spirit and sugar, the liqueur umeshu. The Chinese themselves smoked and preserved the sour plum into wumei and brewed it into suanmeitang, the dark, cooling sour-plum drink of the imperial summer. The Japanese plum, Prunus salicina, completed the circle: carried from China to Japan over centuries, it was imported into California by the plant breeder Luther Burbank in 1885, whose Santa Rosa and dozens of sister cultivars made the United States, and then the Southern Hemisphere, the modern centre of fresh-plum growing. When the French prune d'Agen reached the same Californian valleys in 1856 in the baggage of Louis Pellier, the western and eastern streams of the plum's four-thousand-year journey at last ran together in a single orchard country.
The plum is one of the most widely cultivated stone fruits on earth, and its production divides neatly along the ancient lines of its domestication. China is by a wide margin the world's largest producer, growing both the fresh Japanese plum (Prunus salicina) and the ume (Prunus mume) in enormous quantity. After China come Romania, Serbia, and the other plum nations of Central Europe and the Balkans, where the European plum (Prunus domestica) remains the orchard fruit of national identity: Serbia treats the plum (šljiva) as a near-sacred fruit, the basis of its national spirit, slivovitz, and the centrepiece of its preserves and dumplings. The United States, chiefly California, grows the fresh dessert plum and the great bulk of the world's dried prunes, the latter descended directly from the prune d'Agen of France.
Culinarily the plum keeps its four identities distinct. The European plum is the baking and preserving fruit of the West: the zwetschgenkuchen of Germany, the plum tart of Alsace, the dumplings of Hungary and Bohemia, the powidl and pekmez of the whole Central European belt, the damson cheese and greengage of England, and the prune that sweetens the tagines of Morocco and the stews of Persia and Ashkenazi Europe. The cherry plum, gathered green, remains the sour heart of Georgian tkemali and the Caucasian and Persian sauce tradition. The ume is never eaten as a fresh fruit at all: across China, Japan, and Korea it is salted into umeboshi, steeped into umeshu and maesil syrup, and brewed into suanmeitang, valued as much for digestion and preservation as for flavour. And the Japanese plum is the round, sweet, juicy fruit of the modern supermarket, eaten fresh out of hand across both hemispheres. Few fruits carry so many separate culinary lives under one name, and fewer still bridge, as the plum does, the cuisines of Tbilisi and Tokyo, of Belgrade and Beijing.
Historical Journey of Plum
South Caucasus and Caspian Basin — c. 2000 BCE
In the foothills and river valleys of the South Caucasus, where the wild ranges of the cherry plum (Prunus cerasifera) and the blackthorn (Prunus spinosa) overlapped, a chance hybridisation produced a new fruit: the hexaploid European plum, Prunus domestica, carrying six sets of chromosomes and a sweetness and size that neither parent possessed. Here, in the lands stretching from the eastern Black Sea coast across modern Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan to the southern shore of the Caspian, the new plum and its tart cherry-plum parent were taken into cultivation by the early agricultural peoples of the region perhaps four thousand years ago. The Caucasus is one of the great cradles of fruit domestication, the homeland not only of the plum but, in the same orchards, of grapes, apples, pears, and pomegranates. From this single mountainous arc the European plum would begin its long westward journey into Persia, the Mediterranean, and the heart of Europe, whilst its sour green sibling, the cherry plum, would remain the defining fruit of the Caucasian table, gathered unripe for the sauces and stews that still anchor Georgian and Persian cooking today.
Yangtze Basin, China — c. 1500 BCE
At the opposite end of temperate Eurasia, in the warm and humid basin of the Yangtze, the Chinese domesticated two plums entirely unknown to the West. The ume (Prunus mume), called mei in Chinese, was cultivated here for well over three thousand years, its hard, intensely sour golden fruit valued less for eating than for preserving, and its blossom, opening in the last cold of late winter, revered above almost all flowers. The Book of Songs, the earliest anthology of Chinese poetry, gathered around 1000 BCE, already sings of the mei. Alongside it grew the Japanese plum (Prunus salicina), misnamed by the West but Chinese in origin, a larger and juicier fruit that could be eaten fresh. The Chinese learned early to smoke and salt the sour ume into wumei, a dark, medicinal preserve, and to steep and brew it into cooling sour-plum drinks. From this Yangtze cradle the ume would travel to Korea and Japan to become maesil and umeboshi, whilst the Japanese plum, carried east and then, far later, across the Pacific to California, would become the round dessert plum of the entire modern world.
Colchis and Kartli, Georgia — c. 1000 BCE
In the kingdoms of Colchis and Kartli, in the valleys of the southern Caucasus where the cherry plum grew wild and abundant, the Georgians made the green, unripe sour plum the foundation of a sauce tradition that has no real parallel in the world. The plums are gathered hard and tart, before any sweetness develops, and simmered down with garlic, coriander, dill, and the wild pennyroyal the Georgians call ombalo into tkemali, the sharp, herbal, intensely savoury plum sauce that accompanies grilled meats, poultry, potatoes, and bread at the Georgian table as ubiquitously as salt. Both the green spring plum and the riper red summer plum yield their own version, the green sourer and the red rounder. Tkemali is far more than a condiment: it is one of the defining flavours of Georgian cuisine, a sourness that does the work that lemon or vinegar does elsewhere, and it makes the sour plum a true culinary staple of the Caucasus rather than merely a fruit. The tradition passed outward into Persia and across the Caucasus, but nowhere did the sour plum become so central to a national table as in Georgia.
Damascus, Syria — c. 100 BCE
The orchards of Damascus, watered by the river Barada and famed throughout antiquity for their fruit, became the great clearing-house of the plum on its way west. It was here that a particular small, oval, blue-black, intensely flavoured plum was cultivated to perfection, and it was from this city that the fruit took the name by which Europe would know it: the damson, a contraction of 'damascene', the plum of Damascus. Roman soldiers and merchants, moving along the trade roads that bound Syria to the Mediterranean world, carried damson stones and cuttings westward, and with them the knowledge of drying the prune plum around its stone without fermentation. Damascus sat at the meeting point of the Persian, Mediterranean, and Arabian worlds, and the plum passed through its markets in both directions: westward to Rome and the Latin world, and, centuries later, southward and westward again with the Arab conquests towards the Maghreb. The damson would find its lasting home not in Syria but in the cooler orchards of England, yet it carried the name of this Syrian city across two thousand years and the whole breadth of Europe.
Ancient Rome, Italy — c. 50 BCE
Rome received the plum with enthusiasm and turned it, almost at once, into both an orchard fruit and a cook's ingredient. Pliny the Elder, writing his Natural History in the first century, marvelled at the 'ingens turba prunorum', the great crowd of plum varieties already crowding Italian gardens, distinguishing the imported damson of Syria from the native and naturalised sorts. The Romans dried the prune plum for winter storage and, crucially, discovered its affinity with meat: in the recipes gathered under the name of Apicius, dried prunes sweeten and sharpen a minutal, a finely chopped stew of pork simmered with wine, honey, and fruit, the ancestor of every sweet-and-sour meat dish from the Persian khoresh to the Moroccan tagine. This Roman marriage of prune and pork, of dried fruit and rich meat, spread with the legions across the whole empire, into Gaul and Germania and Iberia, planting the European plum in the orchards of the north where it would, in time, become the most important fruit of the common people. The prune, portable, sweet, and imperishable, was a soldier's ration and a cook's treasure alike.
Tabriz and Azerbaijan, Persia — c. 600 CE
In the orchards of Persian Azerbaijan, around the great city of Tabriz, the sour plum, the alu, became one of the foundations of the Persian table. Persian cooking is built on a refined balance of sweet and sour, and the plum, both fresh and sour in spring and dried into tart prunes for the rest of the year, is one of its principal agents of sourness. The alu is simmered into the slow meat stews called khoresh, where it cuts the richness of lamb with a fruity acidity, and it is folded into the great stuffed meatballs of Tabriz, koofteh Tabrizi, those football-sized spheres of minced meat, rice, and split peas that conceal a whole dried plum, a walnut, and sometimes an egg at their heart. The dried sour plum travelled outward from Persia in every direction: eastward along the Silk Road to Bukhara and India, and its sweet-sour principle westward to the Arab and Ottoman worlds. In Persia itself the plum remained, and remains, indispensable: the taste of the alu is the taste of the Persian spring, and the prune the quiet engine of the Persian winter stew.
Tang Dynasty China (Chang'an) — c. 700 CE
By the Tang dynasty, the preserving of the sour ume had matured into one of the most sophisticated fruit traditions in the world, centred on the imperial cities of the Chinese heartland. The Chinese never ate the ume fresh; instead they transformed it. Smoked slowly over wood until black and leathery, it became wumei, the 'dark plum', a fixture of the Chinese pharmacy prized for digestion and thirst; salted and dried with liquorice and other flavours, it became huamei, the moreish preserved-plum snack still sold across China today; and, most refreshingly, the smoked dark plums were boiled with hawthorn, dried osmanthus, and rock sugar into suanmeitang, the dark, tart, cooling sour-plum drink that became the great thirst-quencher of the Chinese summer and, in time, a celebrated refreshment of the imperial court. The Chinese mastery of the sour plum, transforming an inedible raw fruit into medicine, snack, and drink, set the pattern that Korea and Japan would inherit and make their own. From Chang'an and the cities of the Tang the cultivation and the craft of the ume radiated outward across the whole of East Asia.
Nara, Japan — c. 750 CE
The ume reached Japan from China around the Nara period, carried, like so much of Japanese high culture, in the wake of Buddhism, and it took root in Japanese life more deeply than almost any other imported plant. The Japanese first treasured its blossom: ume-viewing parties amongst the Nara and Heian aristocracy predate the famous cherry-blossom viewing by centuries, and the ume became the emblem of fortitude, the flower that braves the last snows. But it was in the kitchen that the ume became indispensable. Salted in barrels with red shiso leaves and sun-dried, it became umeboshi, the wrinkled, scarlet, ferociously sour and salty pickled plum that sits at the centre of the Japanese plate: a single umeboshi in the white field of rice in a lunchbox, said to resemble the national flag, and prized as a digestive, a preservative, and a restorative for the samurai on campaign. Steeped whole in spirit with rock sugar, the green ume yields umeshu, the amber plum liqueur of the Japanese household. The sour plum threads through the whole of Japanese cooking, from the umeboshi tucked into an onigiri rice ball to the same pickle dissolved in hot tea and rice as ochazuke.
Bukhara, Transoxiana — c. 900 CE
Carried eastward from Persia along the Silk Road, the dried sour plum reached the great oasis city of Bukhara, in Transoxiana, and there acquired the name it still bears across half of Asia: alu Bukhara, the 'plum of Bukhara'. From this Central Asian crossroads the dried sour plum spread south and east into Afghanistan, the Punjab, Sindh, and the Mughal kitchens of North India, where it remains a defining ingredient of the festive table: stewed into the sweet-sour gravies of Mughlai cooking, simmered with rice, and steeped into compotes. In Afghanistan the alu Bukhara is one of the seven fruits of haft mewa, the seven-fruit compote soaked for days and served at Nowruz to welcome the spring, in which dried plums, apricots, raisins, walnuts, almonds, pistachios, and other dried fruits are steeped together until their syrups mingle. The Bukhara plum is the clearest proof of the fruit's reach: a Caucasian fruit, refined by Persia, named for an Uzbek city, and beloved from Kabul to Delhi, it shows how completely the sour plum had become a staple of the whole Persianate and Central Asian world.
Agen, Gascony, France — c. 1200 CE
According to the enduring tradition of the region, returning Crusaders brought back from Syria a particular prune plum, which the Benedictine monks of the abbey of Clairac, on the river Lot near Agen, grafted onto local rootstock to produce the prune d'Ente, the 'grafted plum'. Dried in the warm air of Gascony, its sugars concentrating around the stone without fermentation, this became the pruneau d'Agen, the most celebrated prune of France and one of the great preserved fruits of Europe. The monks and farmers of the Lot and Garonne valleys built an entire agricultural economy on the drying of plums, and the pruneau d'Agen entered the French kitchen as a treasured ingredient: stewed in Armagnac, simmered with rabbit and pork, and, most beloved of all, baked into the dense, dark, eggy custard flan of Brittany, the far breton, whose plump prunes suspended in golden batter are made, by tradition, with the prune d'Agen above all others. From these Gascon orchards the prune d'Agen would, six centuries later, cross the Atlantic to found the entire Californian prune industry.
Fez, Morocco — c. 1300 CE
Carried westward across the Arab Mediterranean, from the orchards of Syria and Persia through the kitchens of Andalusia to the imperial cities of Morocco, the dried prune became one of the signature notes of the Moroccan tagine. The Persian and Arab love of sweet-savoury cooking, of meat married to fruit and honey and warm spice, found in Morocco its richest and most enduring expression. In the slow-cooked tagine of lamb or beef with prunes, lham bel barqoq, the meat is simmered for hours with cinnamon, ginger, saffron, and onion until it falls from the bone, then crowned with prunes that have been gently stewed in honey and cinnamon until glossy and dark, the whole scattered with toasted almonds and sesame. Sweet, fragrant, and deeply savoury all at once, it is the dish of Moroccan celebration, served at weddings and feasts and at the breaking of the Ramadan fast. The prune in Morocco is no mere garnish but a defining element, the fruit that turns a stew into a banquet, and it marks the western terminus of the sweet-savoury fruit-and-meat tradition that the plum carried out of Persia.
Korea — c. 1400 CE
The ume reached Korea from China and became maesil, where the Korean genius for fermentation and preservation gave it a distinctive new life. The green, unripe maesil, gathered in the brief window of early summer before it ripens, is layered in equal weight with sugar and left to steep for months, drawing out a fragrant, sour-sweet syrup called maesil-cheong. This plum extract became one of the cornerstones of the Korean kitchen: a natural sweetener and souring agent stirred into marinades, dipping sauces, and dressings in place of sugar and vinegar, a digestive tonic diluted into a cooling summer drink, and the base of the plum wine maesilju. Few Korean home kitchens are without a great jar of maesil-cheong maturing through the year. Valued, like the Chinese and Japanese ume traditions before it, as much for health and digestion as for flavour, the Korean sour plum completes the East Asian trinity of preserved-plum cultures: the suanmeitang of China, the umeboshi of Japan, and the maesil-cheong of Korea, three nations transforming the same inedible sour fruit into three quite different staples.
Lorraine and Alsace, France — c. 1500 CE
In the orchards of Lorraine and neighbouring Alsace, the European plum reached one of its finest expressions in two small, jewel-like fruits. The mirabelle de Lorraine, a tiny, round, golden plum freckled with red, ripens in late summer in such abundance that the region produces the overwhelming majority of the world's mirabelles; intensely sweet and honeyed, it is eaten fresh, distilled into a celebrated eau-de-vie, and, above all, baked into the tarte aux mirabelles, a simple open tart of buttery pastry packed with the whole golden fruit. Beside it grows the quetsche, the dark blue-purple oval Alsatian plum, firmer and more acid, which makes the classic tarte aux quetsches, the halved plums fanned across the pastry, their skins caramelising and their juices reducing in the oven. Lorraine also gave the plum world the Reine Claude, the green-gold gage named in honour of Queen Claude, wife of François I, a plum of such perfumed sweetness that it would cross the Channel to become the English greengage. From these French orchards, the gage travelled to England and the plum's fame spread across northern Europe.
Swabia and the Rhineland, Germany — c. 1550 CE
In the German lands the plum, the Pflaume or Zwetschge, became the autumn fruit of the whole population, and the harvest of the blue-black, freestone Italian prune plum, the Zwetschge, was one of the great events of the German culinary year. Its firm flesh, which holds its shape and does not collapse to liquid when baked, made it the perfect fruit for the yeasted or shortcrust sheet cake the Germans call Zwetschgenkuchen or Pflaumenkuchen: the halved plums are packed in tight overlapping rows across a flat tray of dough, dusted with cinnamon sugar, and baked until the fruit caramelises at the edges and floods the cake with dark juice, the whole crowned in season with crumbly Streusel. Across Swabia, the Rhineland, and Bavaria the late-summer Zwetschgenkuchen, eaten warm with a cloud of unsweetened cream, is as fixed a marker of the turning year as the first asparagus is of spring. The Germans also boiled the plum down for days into Pflaumenmus, a thick, dark, spiced plum butter spread on bread through the winter, beginning the great Central European tradition of the long-cooked plum preserve.
Vienna and Bohemia, Habsburg Lands — c. 1600 CE
Across the Habsburg lands of Austria and Bohemia, the plum reached perhaps its most refined preserving tradition in powidl, a thick, dark, glossy plum butter cooked from blue Zwetschgen for many hours, without any added sugar at all, until the fruit's own sugars caramelise into something between a jam and a paste. Powidl is spread thick inside pastries and dumplings, layered through cakes, and eaten through the long Central European winter, and it became the heart of a whole family of beloved dishes: the powidltascherl, little fried pockets of plum butter; the Buchteln, sweet baked buns filled with powidl; and, above all, the Zwetschgenknödel, soft potato-dough dumplings each wrapped around a whole plum and boiled, then rolled in buttery toasted breadcrumbs and sugar. The same plum-butter tradition crossed every cultural line in the multinational empire: it is the lekvar of the Ashkenazi Jewish kitchen, the filling of the hamantasch, and the povidl of the Czech table. From Vienna and Prague the long-cooked plum became one of the defining sweet flavours of the whole of Central Europe.
Hungary — c. 1620 CE
In Hungary the plum, the szilva, became a national passion, grown across the country and transformed into a galaxy of preparations from the homely to the festive. The most beloved is the szilvás gombóc, the plum dumpling: a soft potato dough wrapped around a whole stoned plum, often with a sugar cube tucked into the cavity where the stone had been, boiled until the dough is tender and the plum within has collapsed to a hot, sweet-sour pool, then rolled in butter-toasted breadcrumbs and dusted with sugar and cinnamon. Eaten as a main course in their own right, a plate of plum dumplings is one of the great comfort dishes of the Hungarian and wider Central European table. The Hungarians also cooked the plum down into szilvalekvár, a thick sugarless plum butter simmered in great copper cauldrons over open fires at the autumn harvest, a communal village event; and they distilled it into szilvapálinka, the fierce plum brandy that is the national spirit. The plum, more than almost any other fruit, is woven into the rhythm of the Hungarian year.
Kraków and Lesser Poland — c. 1640 CE
In Poland the plum, the śliwka, became both a sweet preserve and a savoury seasoning, and in the orchards of Lesser Poland around Kraków the fruit was smoke-dried over alder and beech into the prized suska sechlońska, a dark, smoky dried plum unlike any other in Europe. Boiled down without sugar over many hours, the plum became powidła, the Polish plum butter spread on bread and folded into pastries; and, crucially, the smoked dried plum entered the savoury Polish kitchen, lending its dark sweetness and faint smokiness to the great national hunter's stew, bigos, where prunes deepen the slow-cooked tangle of sauerkraut, fresh cabbage, and mixed meats. The plum was equally central to the Ashkenazi Jewish kitchen that flourished across Poland and its borderlands: dried plums and the plum butter called lekvar sweetened the holiday table, and prunes are simmered with carrots, sweet potato, and honey into tzimmes, the sweet stew served at Rosh Hashanah and Passover. Polish and Jewish, sweet and savoury, fresh, dried, and smoked, the plum ran through every kitchen of the Polish lands.
Serbia and the Western Balkans — c. 1660 CE
Nowhere on earth did the plum become so completely the fruit of a nation as in Serbia and the Western Balkans, where the šljiva is treated with something close to reverence and grown in greater quantity than almost anywhere outside China. The blue-black Požegača plum, drying easily and fermenting cleanly, is the heart of three Serbian institutions. The first is slivovitz, šljivovica, the plum brandy that is the national spirit, distilled in every village, poured at every birth, wedding, christening, and funeral, and offered to every guest who crosses the threshold. The second is pekmez, the dark, thick, sugarless plum butter cooked down over open fires at the autumn harvest in a communal labour that gathers whole families. And the third is the table of preserves and dumplings: slatko od šljiva, whole plums preserved glossy and intact in syrup and offered to guests by the spoonful with a glass of water and a cup of coffee, in the central ritual of Serbian hospitality; and knedle sa šljivama, the Balkan cousin of the Central European plum dumpling. To understand the plum in Serbia is to understand that a fruit can become an emblem of a people.
Shropshire and the English Midlands — c. 1725 CE
England gave the plum two of its most distinctive forms. The damson, the small, tart, blue-black 'plum of Damascus' carried north across Europe over centuries, found its truest home in the cool orchards of the English Midlands and the north, above all in Shropshire, Worcestershire, and the Lyth Valley of Westmorland, where damson trees lined the field hedges and the autumn harvest fed a whole domestic economy of preserving. Too sharp to eat raw, the damson was transformed into damson jam and the dense, sliceable, quince-like damson cheese, set firm enough to turn out and cut, served with cold meats and hard cheeses. Then, around 1724, Sir Thomas Gage introduced to his Suffolk estate a green-gold French gage plum, the Reine Claude; its label lost in transit, his gardener simply named it after his master, and the greengage, the sweetest and most perfumed of all dessert plums, entered the English garden. Damson and greengage between them, one ferociously sour and one exquisitely sweet, gave England both ends of the plum's range, and a preserving and orchard tradition that endures in the old hedgerow trees to this day.
Santa Rosa and the California Valleys — c. 1870 CE
In the warm valleys of California the two great streams of the plum's four-thousand-year journey at last converged. The French prune arrived first: in 1856 Louis Pellier, a Gascon nurseryman, grafted scions of the prune d'Agen in the Santa Clara Valley, founding a Californian prune industry that would grow to supply most of the world's dried plums. Then, in 1885, the plant breeder Luther Burbank imported a dozen seedlings of the Japanese plum, Prunus salicina, from Japan to his experimental farm at Santa Rosa, and from them bred the Santa Rosa plum and dozens of sister cultivars, large, round, juicy, and sweet, that transformed the fresh-plum trade across the entire world. The Japanese plum, Chinese in origin, Japanese in name, and Californian in its modern form, became the dessert plum of every supermarket in both hemispheres, carried onward to Chile, South Africa, and Australia. California thus drew together the European prune of the western stream and the Japanese plum of the eastern stream into a single orchard country, and made the United States, alongside China and the Balkans, one of the three great plum powers of the modern world.
