Features

It’s happened every one of the 30 Februarys that I’ve lived here: The first flowering plums bloom in my neighborhood, and I remember why I endure gray, muddy winter. There are a few days of teasing, when the plum behind the recycling yard starts to show white, and then a few more scattered trees join it, and almost immediately the pink plums add their note, almost too sweet. The one that reaches over the back fence starts scenting up the yard and dropping petals over the car, so when I back out and take off down the street I leave a merry trail of mud from the tires and confetti petals from the roof, the hood, the windows. Even on a gloomy day it’s weirdly, bridally festive. 

Flowering plums belong to the same genus, Prunus, as all the other plums and cherries and peaches and nectarines and apricots and (surprise) almonds we eat. The genus includes things that just flower, and things that barely do that, like English laurel. The two species most seen in Berkeley streets and gardens are various cultivars of P. cerasifera, and Prunus blireiana, a hybrid that bears little or no fruit. Flower color is barely a clue, as P. cerasifera comes in pink and white forms; P. blireiana is the one with the lumpy trunk.  

They’re not natives, but do seem to adapt well. In spring you’ll see a few in the parks or semi-wild lands around here, looking oddly off-color in an otherwise muted palette. They don’t seem to be very invasive, so far. Birds eat the fruit (and so do we; even the bland yellow ones make good plum sauce) and the flowers, too. Watch for a flock of finches in a blooming tree; they’ll nibble the sweet base of each petal they pluck, and drop the rest—more celebratory confetti. They’re feeling Spring too, gathering in flocks to migrate or song-jostling each other for breeding territories here.  

Flowering plums are small and generally not disruptive to sidewalks, as trees go, which is one reason they’re here. They sometimes need to lose long straight watersprouts or crossing branches, but they’re annoying to work on because the little aborted twigs in the center dwindle into sharp spikes. Still, if you wait until Spring to prune your prune, you get bonus flowers to bring indoors. 

Shortly after their glorious full chorus, plums give us a slightly melancholy i nterlude. Big rainstorms knock all those petals off the twigs, leaving an odd balding bristle of stamens and pistils, and then (even in drought years) the leaves start to push through, crowding and obscuring the flowers we’ve barely had time to enjoy. Fro st was right: The early leaf is indeed a flower, to the eye at least. That dark red or pale green halo is quick to coarsen into merely pleasant leaves, a signal to get the business of growth underway.  

Flowering plums are scattered all over Berkeley, and there’s a particularly good stretch of them on Carleton Street from just west of Telegraph Avenue to a few blocks west of Sacramento Street.