Damson / Bullace

Photo: Isiwal — CC BY-SA 4.0 · source

Survives zone 5 through 9

Harvest calendar

Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.

Damson and bullace — the old kitchen plums of British and northern European orchards, about 3cm across and sharper than a dessert plum. Acceptable raw when dead ripe and better still after a frost, but this is fundamentally a cooking and preserving fruit, and it makes the best plum jam there is.

Hardiness

Zone 5–9

Habit

Tree

Edible part

Fruit

Ripens

October

Mature size

Tree to 6 m tall and 5 m across, medium growth rate

Light

Full sun for the best fruit; succeeds in light shade

Soil pH

5.5–8.0 (mildly acid to mildly alkaline)

Environment

Temperate

Native range

South-west Asia; long naturalised in Britain and across central Europe, and often treated as native there.

Status

Cultivated

Years to fruit

3–5 yrs

Growth speed

30–60 cm/year — medium to fast.

Spacing

400 cm (157 in) apart — about 16 m² (172 sq ft) per plant

Leaf shape

Alternate, oval to obovate, 4–8 cm long, dull green, softly hairy beneath, with a finely toothed margin, on often thorny twigs.

Root system

Shallow and suckering, throwing root shoots that build a thicket over time — the reason wild American plums form dense colonies.

Fruit description

Small oval plums 2–3 cm long, ripening blue-black under a heavy bloom, with firm, sharply tart, richly flavoured flesh that clings to the stone. ⚠ Too astringent to enjoy raw for most people — this is a cooking plum, and the basis of damson jam, cheese and gin.

Propagation

Suckers lifted in the dormant season are simplest and come true. Seed needs about 90–120 days moist cold stratification at 4°C after the flesh is cleaned off.

Pollination

Self-fertile — a single damson crops without a partner, unusually among plums, though a second cultivar improves fruit size and quality. Insect-pollinated by early bees.

The edible parts listed above are a starting point, not a field guide. Identify a plant with certainty — ideally against a local authority — before eating any part of it, and read the full disclaimer. Spotted something wrong? Report it.