This blog makes me hungry. Actually, it makes me want to eat, which is not the same thing. And it makes my brain want to eat, so here’s another food memory that’s on my mind this time of year.

September: Italian plums. The small, black-purple ones with the greeny-golden insides. I wait all year (if I’ve used up my frozen supply) and then I gorge. I like all plums, I think, but I know these are my favourite.

Some friends of mine have a lovely old plum tree in their backyard, but when they bought their house, they hadn’t had much experience with plums, so the wasps were having a field-day. I happened to stop by for a visit and exclaimed at the gorgeousness of the plums. I was lucky enough to take a bag full home–they were some  of the best prune plums I’ve had. I was pregnant at the time, so hormones may have contributed to the eating ecstasy, but I’m willing to bet they were just amazing plums.

We have a really annoying tree in our garden. It defies categorizing and identifying. Gardeners are stumped by it. I call it the aphid tree because all it seems to know how to do is grow aphids. It sends suckers shooting up in a ten foot radius around itself. And in the three years we’ve been here, it has only ever had two flowers on it, and nothing else. Which only made it more impossible to identify, and more annoying. We’ve been talking about cutting it down and putting in a fruit tree.

Then. I went into the garden after work last week and something caught my eye. It was a trick, clearly. Someone had glued a prune plum onto one of the branches. A nice, fat, dark purple prune plum of my dreams. I wish I had not ripped it off and run screaming back into the house because I have no photo to show for it: The aphid tree (at least one branch of it), is in fact, an Italian plum tree. Praise the fruit gods (who apparently have quite the sense of humour). Now to find an arbourist who can prune us into Septembers of plums…how’s that for a collective noun?

XO

R

PS- That lone plum was delicious.