PLUMS ON PARADE

This month David Patch is talking plums, and explains why compromise and patience are both important in choosing which variety to grow

- David Patch

Gardening can mean many things to different people, from the aesthetic of creating a beautiful herbaceous border to the sheer visceral pleasure of burrowing in the soil to unearth your first new potatoes of the season. For me, gardening has meant embracing two attitudes that don’t come easily: patience and compromise.

Patience as a gardener is relatively straightforward to grasp. Garden centers may be full of pots of instant color (and these hits of immediate gratification certainly have their place), but the real joy comes from planting a seed with the promise of fruit or flower in several months’ time. Or, in the case of planting a mulberry tree, in about 10 years’ time.

Compromise becomes clear once you have started to develop a relationship with your own garden and realize that not everything you see on television or in glossy gardening magazines will grow in your particular site. We are truly spoilt in the number of plants, seeds, and bulbs that we can purchase, but more often than not we will have to compromise between what we would like and what we can grow well - and what we can afford!

A BIG FAMILY

The fruit that most brings this spirit of compromise to the fore is the plum family.