Plum: any of several trees producing edible oval fruit having a smooth skin and a single hard stone.
If only it was that simple!
Now I do enjoy learning something new, something I’ve never heard off. Well recently I’ve been on a learning curve of the everyday stuff, like how to get gum out of a woolly jumper (the freezer trick on this material doesn’t work!)
But today while looking for information on something totally different I came across a new plum a sand plum! Intrigued I looked into this discovery, feeling like an early explorer I noted the marking on the leaves the fact it’s very much like a wild cherry plum.
I read harder I spent hours comparing images from its native land and my own foraging notes. Its true something I believed to be very British very much part of my jam heritage, turn on its head. Yes over here and over lovely!
So further reading lead to the conclusion that my tart, yet sweet cherry plum is in fact a sand plum native to North American. Cultivated by the Native Americans, many moons ago! But the cherry plum, something I’ve picked from the Welsh countryside to secret places on coastlines to hidden trees hiding inside the New Forest is in fact American? Can this be true?
The names keep going around in my head, Sand, Cherry, Horse, Beech I could see in my minds eye these beauties lining the skate parks of California, a new plum BEACH plum!
I was getting overwhelmed by the research. But then I remembered it has to be an English Plum not an American! How am I so certain well the concluding fact is this. Wild plums are in fact a very close relation to wild cherry’s so CHERRY Plum it is. Now were was I sage and plum jam!