Plum advice

Charles Quest-Ritson has grown more than 20 types of plum, gage, mirabelle and damson over the years. Here, he recommends some of the finest

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THIS has been an excellent season for plums—and that includes gages, damsons and mirabelles. Botanists have for a long time insisted that all the different types have developed from only one species, Prunus domestica, a native of Armenia and the neighbouring countries of western Asia— and modern DNA tests confirm this. Plums are large, soft-fleshed and can be treated as cookers or eaters. Gages are small, round and sweet. Damsons are especially hardy and have a spicy, tart flavour, excellent when cooked or jammed. Mirabelles are best thought of as very small gages.

The differences between the groups are the result of centuries of selection in different areas, at different times and for different purposes. They are a monument to our ancestors’ tenacity and good taste over many centuries. Ignore those thick-skinned plums from China that you see in supermarkets and taste of nothing. They are cultivars of Prunus salicina—I have no use for them, either raw or cooked.

Most Brits don’t think beyond ‘Victoria’, an English variety that foreigners regard as insipid. ‘Bland and boring’ was the verdict of our own English super-cook Jane Grigson. ‘Victoria’ is valued because it’s a regular cropper and, usually, abundant. I grow it only because we inherited it with the house. It suffers from bacterial canker, brown rot, plum moth and silver leaf and, if I were sensible, I would cut the tree down, but I can’t do so now because I have run a climbing rose up it.