The plums of New York

by U. P. Hedrick

“then are the wicker baskets cramm’d

With Damask and Armenian and Wax plums.”

The yellow plums of the Roman poets, Ovid and Vergil, are probably the Bullaces or Mirabelles of this species. Indeed, its cultivation was probably prehistoric, for Heer[67] has illustrated and described stones of a plum found in the lake-dwellings of Robenhausen which can be no other than those of Insititia.

The authentic written history of this plum may be said to have begun with or a little before the Christian Era. The records of the cultivation and development through the early centuries of the present chronology and the Middle Ages to our own day may be found in the herbals, botanies, pomologies, agricultural and general literature of the past two thousand years.

Prunus insititia now grows wild in nearly all temperate parts of Europe and western Asia—from the Mediterranean northward into Norway, Sweden and Russia. The botanists of Europe very generally agree that its original habitat was in southern and southeastern Europe and the adjoining parts of Asia, and that elsewhere it is an escape from cultivation. Hooker[68] says that Prunus insititia grows in western temperate Himalaya, cultivated and indigenous, from Gurwhal to Kashmir, the type being that of the “common yellow-fruited Bullace.” A few botanical writers hold that it is truly wild in the parts of Europe where now found growing. There are also not a few botanists who, as has been stated in the discussion of the Domestica plums, unite the Insititias with the Domesticas, and others who combine these two with the Spinosa plums in one species, Prunus communis.[69]

It is possible that the species is occasionally found naturalized in eastern United States; several botanists so give it.

Wherever the habitat of the Insititia plums may have been, practically all writers from the Greeks and Romans who first mention this fruit to those of the present time, connect the cultivated varieties in one way or another with the old Semite city, Damascus. It is almost certain that the Syrians or Persians were the first to cultivate these plums, and that they were unknown in Europe as domesticated varieties until the Greeks first and the Romans afterward came in intimate contact with the people of the Orient. Thus it is often stated in the old pomologies that Alexander the Great brought these plums from the Orient after his expedition of conquest and that some centuries later Pompey, returning from his invasion of the eastern countries, brought plums to the Roman Empire.

The history of the Insititia plums in America has been given in the main in the discussion of the Domestica plums, for the varieties of the two species have never been kept separate by plum-growers, all being grouped together as European plums. It is probable, however, that the Damson plums of this species were earlier introduced and more generally grown than any other of the European plums by the English settlers of America, as the references to plum-growing before the Revolution are largely to the Damsons. The reasons for this early preference for these plums are that they come true to seed while most varieties of the Domestica do not; and trees and cions were not readily transportable in colonial times; and, too, the Damsons have always been favorite plums with the English.

When the first American fruit books were published at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century the Damsons and Bullaces were widely grown, for all writers give a relatively large number of varieties of these plums and speak well of them. Thus McMahon,[70] in his list of thirty plums gives six that belong here, ending his list with “Common Damson, etc.,” as if there were still more than those he enumerates. Prince, in his Pomological Manual, in 1832, gives at least eighteen sorts that may be referred to Insititia with the statement that one of them, the Early Damson “appears to have been brought to this country by the early Dutch settlers, or by the French who settled here at the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes,” adding, “It is much disseminated throughout this section of the country.” At the end of the Eighteenth Century Deane’s[71] New England Farmer or Georgical Dictionary, in a discussion of plums in general says: “The most common plum in this country is the Damascene plum, an excellent fruit for preserving, which is said to have been brought from Damasam, hence the name.”

The hardiness, thriftiness and productiveness of all of the varieties of this species commend them to those who cannot give the care required to grow the less easily grown Domesticas, and in America, as in Europe, these plums are to be found in almost every orchard and in many communities half-wild, thriving with little or no care. The fact that they are easily propagated, growing readily from suckers and coming true to seed is an added reason for their general distribution.