STORY BEHIND THE ART OF JANE HANCOCK

Abundant Future: Cultivating Diversity in Garden, Farm, and Field

Wild Plum

Prunus americana

A friend introduced me to the sweet, tart little fruits of the wild plum from trees in her back yard. She grew up in farm country in southwest Minnesota, and has vivid memories of foraging for wild plums with her brothers and sisters every year in the late summer. The trees were often found growing by roadsides and along ditches. As farm chemical use has become more and more intensive the plum trees have done poorly, and are now mostly gone in heavily farmed areas.

I visited my friend’s plum trees throughout a season, and developed my composition from numerous sketches and photos. Achieving the red-orange color of the ripe fruit was an enjoyable challenge; the fruit has a waxy bloom, and yet, as my friend said, when the fruit is at the peak of ripeness it almost seems to glow.

Native plum trees include many species and range widely in North America. The American plum, Prunus americana, is the most common and is notable for its cold hardiness. Its range extends from southern Canada south to Florida, and the entire area east of the Rocky Mountains. The trees are valuable sources of food and shelter for birds and mammals.

The small shrubby American plum trees tend to grow in dense, thorny thickets. They need sun and tolerate many types of soil, but are especially adapted to the moist soil found along the margins of streams, ponds, and wetlands. In spring they flower in abundant clusters of fragrant white blossoms, alive with pollinators, and they fruit in late summer. The fruit is delicious both fresh and dried, and in sauces and preserves.

People have used native plums for forage and cultivation in North America since before recorded history. Early colonizers of the eastern seaboard left records noting extensive thickets of wild plum, American hazelnut, and wild crabapple managed by indigenous people for food. Southwestern and plains tribes including Pima, Cheyenne, and Navajo used the trees as sources for food, medicines, and dyes at least as early as the period of Spanish colonization.

Forage and cultivation of native plums continued to be common up through the late 19th century. Laura Ingalls Wilder described wild plum foraging in “On the Banks of Plum Creek” (1937), in a charming episode when Laura and her sister gathered buckets full of the fruit to dry as part of the family’s food supply for the winter.

Interest in the American plum really took off in the north central U.S. after the Civil War. As white migrants like Wilder’s family surged into the new states and territories, they found to their dismay that the fruits they loved did not survive the harsh climate of their new homes. Professional and amateur growers turned their attention to breeding better native fruits. Horticulturists from Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota and South Dakota collaborated in sharing information about American plum trees with desirable traits such as larger fruit and sweeter flavor. Varieties of P. americana such as ‘De Soto’, ‘Terry’, ‘Wyant’, and ‘Wolf’ gained popularity throughout the region, along with many other named and unnamed strains.

By the very early 1900s, scientific fruit breeding programs were in full swing at research universities. The northern states funded public university programs to conduct intensive work developing cold-hardy apples, strawberries, grapes, and other popular fruits along with plums, with a goal of developing a commercial fruit growing industry.

Hardy native plums were especially useful to these programs because the European plum (P. domestica) and Japanese plum (P. salicina) were far too tender for the upper Midwest’s harsh climate. American plums (and occasionally Canadian plums, and even sand cherries) were intensively hybridized with Japanese varieties and hybrids developed by Luther Burbank. The University of Minnesota began crossing Japanese with American plums in 1908, and between 1920 and 1925 introduced no fewer than fourteen new trees.

The northern fruit breeding programs such as the one at U. Minnesota achieved lasting commercial success with apples, grapes, strawberries, and other fruits, but alas not with plums. Interest in growing the new plums tapered off around the middle of the 20th century, and eventually the programs faded, because the hybridizers were not able to overcome the trees’ early bloom and consequent susceptibility to frost.

Today some American plum hybrids are still available from nurseries and have a market with home growers and as cross-pollination sources for Japanese plums. The best known is the ‘Toka’ plum (americana x simonii), which was introduced in 1911 by South Dakota State University. “Underwood” and “La Crescent” (both Burbank’s ‘Shiro’ x americana) are others, started in 1908 in and released by the University of Minnesota in 1920 and 1923.

And of course the wild American plum still persists in parks and natural places, providing a delicious treat for those who know where to forage.

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Read more about this artist’s work: 23rd Annual