AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 2015 • NEBRASKAland 45
plum is solid. What more could
Nebraskans ask of a wild fruit?
A Thicket-
forming
Shrub
The American plum's core
distribution extends from North Dakota
east to Rhode Island and south to
Oklahoma and northern Florida with
isolated populations to the north, west
and south. It has been speculated that
prior to Euro-American settlement,
Native Americans introduced the plum
to the Great Plains from farther east as
a food source. Some tribes grew the
plum in orchard-like settings, selecting
sweet-fruited varieties.
Usually a suckering, thicket-forming
shrub reaching about 10 feet in height,
the American plum rarely takes the
form of a small, single-trunked tree.
Specimens with foot-wide trunks
and 20 to 35 feet in height have been
reported in Nebraska. The national
champion American plum growing in
Virginia is an 18-foot tall monster with
a trunk 3.8 feet in diameter. Over 200
forms of the plum have been selected
for domestic cultivation, including non-
suckering and thinner-skinned varieties.
The plum's white flowers, arranged
in clusters of three to five, appear
before or as the leaves develop in
mid-April through early-May. When
in full bloom, a plum thicket is a thing
of beauty, appearing snow white on
the greening spring landscape and
emanating a perfumed fragrance. The
fruits ripen from yellow to orange
and finally to deep red or purple in
mid-August through September. They
vary in shape from bush to bush,
from oval to round, and in size, from
slightly larger than a marble to the
girth of a ping pong ball. Fruit size
may be partially due to genetics, but
may also reflect growing conditions.
A plum bush growing alone in a
glacial rock pile on our South Dakota
farm, free of competition from other
vegetation, consistently produces large,
scrumptious plums.
A member of the Rose family, the
American plum has close relatives
in the state. The wild-goose plum
(P. hortulana), a tall, thicket-former
with red fruits, was last seen in
Nebraska along the Nemaha River
in Richardson County in 1940. Also
rare, the red and red-yellow fruited
Chickasaw plum (P. angustifolia) was
last collected in 1897 from a pasture
in Adams County. These two species
are both more common southward
into Kansas and might still be found
in Nebraska. Also in the genus Prunus
are the chokecherry (P. virginiana), a
common shrub found nearly statewide,
and the sand cherry (P. pumila), a
Plum
THE FRAGRANCE OF PLUM blossoms is one of the joys of spring. The shrub above
flowers on the Prairie Plains Resource Institute's Ratzlaff Prairie in Hamilton County.
