Every Plum Imaginable

The Santa Rosa plums on the tree near my window have started to ripen, filling my room with their fruity bouquet. The crimson-purple Santa Rosa is a plum with more personality than many of us are used to these days, tart near the skin and pit with sweet flesh and intense, almost overpowering, perfume.

Not so long ago, it was the dominant plum in California. But marketing demands--the need for durable fruit with a long shelf life--have done to the plum very much what those same demands have done to the tomatoes most people buy and complain so bitterly about. But, as with the tomato, the situation is far from grim, thanks to the willingness of many bold producers to swim against the tide.

In fact, as I’ve traveled across the state during the last three summers, I’ve found astounding diversity and, often, extraordinary quality--plums new and old, big and small, green, black, purple, red and yellow, tough and tender, wretched and exquisite--enough to overwhelm any palate accustomed to the characterless impostors in the grocery bin.

For now, farmers markets and fruit stands are the places to look for the best plums, although even chain stores will carry a fine Santa Rosa when the season is in full swing.

The plum season starts with a whisper in late May, with a few weeks of so-so early varieties. The prime varieties start ripening now and will be coming to market every week through September. This year’s harvest looks to be a good one in California, which produces 95% of the nation’s fresh plum crop.

There are three main kinds of plums grown in the United States: American, European and Asian. For centuries, California Indians harvested wild plums, but these are small and very tart. Spanish missionaries and American settlers brought European types, such as small, sweet greengages, tart culinary plums like damsons, and prunes, which are plums that can be dried whole without fermenting. Today, however, more than 96% of the plums grown for fresh market in California are Asian types, which are relatively large, attractive and productive.

Luther Burbank, the celebrated plant breeder based in Santa Rosa, was the father of California’s Asian plum industry. Between 1885 and his death in 1926, Burbank imported dozens of plum trees from Japan, crossed them with other species, including some native to America, and introduced more than 100 new varieties. Most fell into oblivion, but about half a dozen, including the Santa Rosa, Satsuma, Kelsey and Elephant Heart, are still grown today.

Burbank’s greatest creation, the Santa Rosa, has fallen out of favor with farmers because they can no longer make money on it. The Santa Rosa’s share of the plum harvest has dropped from 35% in 1961 to just 4% today. The Santa Rosa is smaller than modern varieties (though it was considered a big plum when it was introduced in 1906), so it costs more to harvest, and chain store buyers prefer larger fruit.

In the last three decades, growers have dramatically increased production of large, firm, black plums such as Friar and Blackamber, which look ripe even when they’re not, don’t show bruises and withstand rough handling and prolonged storage. Many are exported to Taiwan and Hong Kong, and they hold up well during the long journey by boat. As for flavor, there often isn’t any.

I observed the Blackamber’s durability at Hosaka Farms in Reedley, the center of the plum industry, which is 20 miles southeast of Fresno. The workers started picking at dawn, while it was still cool, singing softly to themselves and cracking jokes as they moved the ladders around the orchard to strip the trees. They filled canvas bags strapped to their chests, then opened a flap at the bottom to dump the plums into huge plastic bins. When I sampled a few fruits, even the darkest and ripest was bland, termed “neutral” in the trade.

Such mild flavor can be a commercial advantage, said David Ramming, a fruit breeder with the U.S. Department of Agriculture who introduced the Blackamber and several other leading plum varieties. “When a fruit has special aromas, not everybody likes them,” he said at his office. “If the flavor is really strong, it can limit the market.”

The black skin and firm, amber flesh of many modern varieties derive from Prunus simonii, an Asian plum species that also, unfortunately, has mediocre flavor. Even so, Blackamber and Friar would taste good, Ramming maintained, if farmers picked them ripe. But most chain stores demand plums hard as rocks for a long shelf life.

Ramming himself enjoys highly flavored plums and is working to preserve the Santa Rosa flavor in commercially viable varieties. It’s no cinch.

“As soon as we make them larger and firmer, we lose that distinctive flavor,” he said. “You really have to work to get all the desirable characteristics together.”

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A private fruit breeder widely regarded as the Luther Burbank of the modern age, Floyd Zaiger of Modesto, may have done just that. He revolutionized the plum world by introducing his trademarked Pluots, plum-apricot hybrids in which plum genes and characteristics prevail.

From their introduction in the early 1990s, Pluots have seized a quarter of the market for plum-like fruits, largely at the expense of traditional plums. The best, such as Flavor Supreme, ripe now, and Flavor King, which matures in August, are superbly sweet and delicious.

A recent genetic study of two Pluot varieties, however, has raised the possibility that some Pluots may actually be purebred plums, without an apricot component. Such a finding, if confirmed, would be of more than academic interest to the research’s sponsor, the California Tree Fruit Agreement.

This industry organization, which promotes and regulates the state’s plums (but not Pluots), is supported by an assessment of 20 cents on each 28-pound box; by remaining unregulated, Pluot farmers will save almost $1 million this year on some 5 million boxes.

Zaiger’s daughter, Leith Gardner, who supervises the family’s breeding operations, said she believed that all the Pluots sold to this point had some apricot genes. “That’s what my records show,” she said. “But I can’t be absolutely sure, and after six generations of breeding, many of the hybrids are very complex.”

To further complicate matters, she added, some of the Zaigers’ just-released Pluots may also contain peach or nectarine genes. (All of these hybrids are produced through conventional pollination, not through controversial genetic modification.)

There are other researchers working on such cutting-edge fruits, but most of them serve as the proprietary breeders of large growers and shippers and won’t discuss their discoveries. On a broiling afternoon last July, however, Jim Krause, general manager of C&C; Nurseries, agreed to show me around his experimental planting in Reedley.

The nursery’s strategy ran counter to conventional wisdom, I noted with amazement, as I tasted an extraordinarily sweet and juicy plum with bright golden-yellow skin and flesh. Hardly anyone grows light-colored plums because they scuff and bruise easily. But C&C; has planted 300 acres, half of which will bear fruit this year, of a series of varieties called King Midas, all so delicate that they must be wrapped in tissue paper and packed in the field.

I also tried several experimental yellow-orange Tropical plums with a surprising banana flavor; these probably contain apricot genes, said Krause. I was a bit too early, however, to try any of the Holiday plums intended to extend the Santa Rosa flavor into late-season varieties.

Finally, whereas every other breeding program strives for maximum size in new plum selections, Krause showed me a series of Baby plums the size of cherry tomatoes, intended, he said, for food service at locations such as schools and military bases. “You can eat them with one hand while you’re driving,” he said.

As I drove away, my head was spinning, from the 106-degree heat and the novelty of what I had just seen.

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A few weeks later, at nearby Huerta Farms, I encountered an even more outlandish variety called Broken Heart. As we walked through a half-acre planting of this legendary curiosity, Elsie Huerta told me the tale: About 15 years ago her friend Frank Vieira, a farmer in Ivanhoe, Calif., noticed some odd greenish-yellow plums in a just-picked batch of Elephant Heart, an old variety famous for its brownish-purple skin and juicy, blood-red flesh.

At first he scolded his workers for harvesting unripe fruit, but they led him to a limb on one tree that bore only such plums. It was a sport, a mutation. He was getting old, so he decided to give Huerta the rights. Recently she grafted over another five acres.

As she talked, I cut into a fruit and marveled at its bizarre bicoloration. The luscious golden flesh was streaked with red, radiating from the stone. I asked Huerta, “Is this why it’s named Broken Heart?” No, she said, her special plum was named in honor of a long-lost boyfriend and her own broken heart.

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For fruit quality, the differences among varieties are crucial, but the influence of the growing area is also important. Or rather, used to be: Fresno, Tulare and Kern counties now produce 98% of California’s plums. In its golden age between the wars, however, Placer County alone shipped close to half of the state’s crop and enjoyed a nationwide reputation for the best fruit.

“In the Sierra foothills, our cool nights allow the plums to hang on the trees longer, so they develop deeper color and flavor,” said 80-year-old Robert Hansen, whose father started growing plums in Loomis in 1908. When I tasted some of his Larodas, picked tree-ripe into small wooden lugs, they indeed had a complex, winy flavor with a complement of sparkling acidity. “Chiropractic plums,” he called them, “because they’re so juicy you have to bend forward to eat them.”

Once there were 23 packing sheds between Roseville and Colfax, but with the growth of irrigated agriculture on the flat, deep soil of the San Joaquin Valley, those farms proved three times as productive as orchards in the foothills; factor in suburban development and the passing of generations, and Placer County’s last packing co-op, Loomis Fruit Growers, closed in spring last year. Hansen, the last president, kept it alive for its 100th anniversary; now he and his family depend on farmers markets and a packer in El Dorado County to sell their 30 acres of plums.

Against all odds, one farmer, 83-year-old Howard Nakae of Newcastle, is battling to restore the vitality of Placer County plums. Ironically, one of the area’s commercial disadvantages--its late harvest--may prove its salvation.

Sun World International, a huge grower based in Bakersfield, has enjoyed great demand for its Black Diamond, a sweet dark-skinned, red-fleshed proprietary variety. To extend the season by three weeks, Sun World asked Nakae to plant 85 acres in the rolling foothills near Lincoln. When I visited last July, the 3-year-old trees bore disappointingly few fruits, due to rain during bloom (plums are notoriously finicky in their pollination requirements), but Nakae expects a good crop this year.

In the most distant corner of the state, there is another farm clinging to tradition: the only remaining commercial orchard of native Sierra plums, which grow wild in the mountains of northeastern California. A mile south of the Oregon border, flanked by the shallow, 20-mile-long Goose Lake to the west, and the Warner Mountains to the east, is a wild, lonely valley where cattle and hay are the main crops. When I arrived on a misty September morning, John Stringer, 47, showed me his orchard of 3,000 shrubby trees, loaded with small, round, cherry-red fruits, from which he makes wines and jams. “I’m at elevation 4,600 feet,” he said. “It can snow any month of the year, so only wild plums are hardy enough to grow here.”

Stringer popped a few fruits in his mouth as he picked a bucket to sell at his roadside store. “It’s not really an eating plum,” he said. “Not unless you’re born here.” As he picked I tried a few fruits, which had tart flesh and astringent skin--not unlike the native plum that Burbank bred with Asian varieties to add a mysterious tinge to his Santa Rosa.

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At his farm south of San Jose, another quixotic dreamer, Andy Mariani, maintains a collection of about 500 rare varieties of stone fruit, a true treasure of California agriculture. Of his plums, his favorites are the greengages, arguably the most exquisite, richly flavored fruits in the world. Once, when the Santa Clara Valley was America’s greatest prune district, farmers grew these European plums for canning, but no longer, since the factories and subdivisions of Silicon Valley have sprawled over the ghosts of vanished orchards.

Each August, I find time to visit Mariani for the greengage harvest. Invariably, as he guides me through the dozen or so greengage trees, he resorts to quoting Edward Bunyard’s “The Anatomy of Dessert,” the 1929 bible of fruit connoisseurs. On the Old Green Gage, Bunyard said, “In no fruit is supreme ripeness more necessary.”

On Coe’s Golden Drop, a greengage hybrid: “At its ripest it is drunk rather than eaten.”

On the Transparent Gage, another greengage relative: One sees “a slight flush of red and then one looks into the depths of transparent amber as one looks into an opal, uncertain how far the eye can penetrate.”

At his farm stand in Morgan Hill, Mariani offers just a few of these delicate fruits, along with tiny, super-sweet mirabelles, beloved of European jam makers. He always warns me, “Don’t tell people that I have a commercial orchard of these things.” His output is just too small.

For years, it has been my own quixotic dream to find a commercial greengage orchard in California. Many farmers claim to grow greengages, but these almost always turn out to be Asian varieties, which look vaguely similar but have nothing like the flavor.

Last month, I got another call. Albert Vera, the owner of Sorrento market in Culver City and that city’s former mayor, told me that he had planted a new orchard in Porterville, and he thought the trees were true greengages.Last Friday, I braced myself for disappointment--and pointed my truck north once again.

Three hours later, I arrived at the orchard. The farm manager, Dan Murphee, led me to a block of about 50 slender young trees, part of 200 planted in January. Long, thin leaves, light spots on the wood--they looked suspiciously like Asian plums. Still, the tags on the new trees bore the label “green gage.”

I clipped a branch and brought it to Craig Ledbetter, a stone-fruit breeder at the San Joaquin Valley Agricultural Sciences Center in nearby Parlier. Later that afternoon, he identified it: Without a doubt, it was an Asian plum. And I was foiled again.

Somewhere in California, I believe, there remains a producing orchard of true greengages. If it takes another three years, I am determined to find it--and if it doesn’t exist, I’ll grow it myself.