Plum
Prunus domestica (and wild Prunus) · also: plum, prune, prunier
ripe nowFruit & berries🗓 Fruit ripe Aug–Sep📍 1 on map
How to ID it
- Round fruit 2–5 cm with a dusty, powdery bloom you can rub off, a single flattened stone, and one shallow seam running down the side. Colour ranges purple, blue-black, red, or yellow.
- Oval, finely-toothed leaves; new growth and twigs often reddish. Bark dark with horizontal lenticels.
- Spring: clusters of white 5-petal blossoms, before or with the leaves.
- Tells it apart from cherry / chokecherry: plums are larger, hang mostly singly, and have a flattened seamed stone — cherries dangle in clusters on long stalks with round pits.
Safety
- The flesh is edible raw and cooked, with no dangerous lookalikes. As with all Prunus, only the stone, leaves, and twigs are cyanogenic — don't crush and eat the pits.
- Wild and ornamental plums run from sweet to mouth-puckering; astringency fades when the fruit is dead-ripe (soft, easily pulled) and disappears with cooking, so try one before picking a bagful.
Cultivated and feral plums turn up as street and yard trees all over Montréal — an escaped orchard plum or an ornamental cherry-plum will fruit heavily and mostly go unpicked. One’s on the map now (a loaded purple-plum street tree), with green immature fruit still ripening alongside the first ripe ones in early August.
Harvest
- Pick when the fruit is fully coloured, gives to a gentle squeeze, and pulls off easily. Under-ripe plums are hard and astringent — leave them a week.
- Ripening runs roughly August into September depending on the tree; a single tree drops over a couple of weeks, so check back.
- Watch for wasps on windfalls and split skins after rain.
Prep
- Best fresh off the tree when dead-ripe. Otherwise: jam, compote, plum butter, or roasted with the stones out.
- Tart/astringent cultivars are cook-only — they make excellent jam and sauce, and a good hedgerow gin/vodka.
- Halve and twist to pop the stone; a clingstone type may need cutting around.
Notes
(Note which trees are sweet-enough-raw vs. cook-only, and their ripening dates.)
Updated 2026-08-07