Prunus americana

Before European settlement reshaped the eastern landscape, Prunus americana was a fixture at the forest edge: thicket-forming, thorny, and extravagantly beautiful in early spring when the plum covered itself in white flowers before the leaves had even stirred. The Lakota knew the plum as kañta, the Cherokee as gunasdv, and across dozens of nations from the Great Plains to the Appalachians the tree was considered a plant of genuine importance. The fruits were eaten fresh, dried into cakes, and worked into pemmican, the dense, calorie-rich mixture of dried meat, fat, and fruit that sustained people through long winters and longer journeys. The inner bark was used medicinally, and the dense, close-grained wood was worked into tools. This was not an ornamental plant in the minds of the people who knew it first. The plum was a resource, in the fullest sense.

What the plum has always been, regardless of who is looking, is spectacular in flower. The blooms open in mid-spring on bare branches, dense, flat-topped clusters of fragrant white flowers that smother the tree before a single leaf appears, feeding native bees and early pollinators at the precise moment they most need foraging. The plums ripen in early summer to clusters of round red fruit, sour-skinned and sweet-fleshed, good fresh and excellent in jams and preserves. Birds find them reliably, and so do people who know to look.

Prunus americana is a thicket-forming small tree, suckering steadily into dense colonies, occasionally thorny enough to be genuinely impenetrable, and broadly tolerant of difficult conditions. The plum grows across a remarkable range, from Saskatchewan to Florida, which speaks to an adaptability earned over millennia rather than selected for in a nursery. For a plant with deep roots in this continent's ecology, literally and otherwise, this is the tree.

Photo courtesy of Rick Webb.