PlantFiles: Wild Plum, American Plum, Goose Plum
Prunus americana

Wild plums are a thorny, winter hardy, thicket forming tall shrub with edible fruit. They are important to the wildlife in our area for nesting, loafing, browsing and food.

Pests: Prairie Tent Caterpillar

Diseases: Stem decay, branch cankers, black knot, plum pockets.

I put 3 plum seedlings on a hillside of always-muddy clay where nothing else would grow, and they're thriving. 5 years later, they've expanded into a thicket. The birds and the critters love it, and I rarely get to snag a plum for myself. Japanese beetles love it too, but it's so vigorous that the beetles don't slow it down. This stuff thrives on bad soil and neglect. Just be careful where you put it, because they do sucker explosively, and they're very difficult to kill.

I love these little trees. They are beautiful in flower and fruit, but more rare today because the natural clearings they once inhabited are the same sort of areas we like to build on, pave, or plow under. I have seen trees absolutely coverd in fruit. But I have never tasted them. Remember native plants and animals evolved together and the birds always get the jump on us humans. So if you want to grow these for fruit, I would recommend netting.

My images are of the Non-Fruiting variety of Prunus americana (Flowering Plum) that grows all over Phoenix, Arizona. It blooms in Late Winter (Late January/Early February) in zone 9b.

Excellent fruit, no maintenance, beautiful flowers. Grows wild in Carolina Sandhills on dry, sandy ridgelines and abandoned agricultural fields. Very hardy species.

An early bloomer in spring. Small fruits that can be eaten if you want to go to the work considering that you get very little food from each fruit. Great food for wild birds and squirrels in the area. Easily grown from seed.

Wild plums can be an attractive little landscape tree if you can put it in the middle of the lawn and always keep the grass mowed around it.This will prevent the problems with the suckers.However if it is put in an area that never gets mowed it could be a real problem.They will sucker as far as 25 feet from the parent tree.

I hate wild plum bushes. We have 32 acres that we are trying to clear and they are everywhere. We can't kill them. They flatten our tractor tires.
I have been out there with my clippers and handsaw cutting then down, one at a time. Some of them, we have hooked chains around them and pulled them up with a tractor or a truck.

I am trying to find a way to get rid of them. If anyone knows how, please e-mail.
[e-mail:staff@clayhillsaloon.com]

Plum thickets are a vanishing sight. It's something that used to be common before the countryside was developed.

Great fruits that make exceptional jelly, we picked many bucketfulls as children and had the jelly all winter.

The trees are hardly larger than big bushes, rarely taller than 20 feet. One of the first things to bloom in the Spring.

Wild goose plums spring up readily in old fields in the Virginia piedmont. The plum are edible but have a peculiar flavor and are clingstone. I ate them as a kid when other fruits weren't available. They ripened between the wild strawberries and the huckleberries. They could be an atractive shrub/tree and in the wild are good for wildlife.