A Timing Issue
A prediction: the ornamental plum harvest won’t be great this year thanks to global warming
Picking plums from the ornamental plum trees around the corner from our house isn’t easy, but it’s worth it. The trees are a variety with dark red/purple leaves, the exact same color as the skin of the fruit. You almost have to feel your way through the foliage to find the plums. Once you do, though, you’ll be rewarded with absolutely delicious, sweet fruit. Supermarket plums are hit or miss. The plums from the street trees are guaranteed tree candy.
No one else seems to pick them from the two trees growing at the curb (I have checked with the people who live in the house there, and they don’t care if we do), so for the two or three weeks that they’re ripe, I make sure to grab a few whenever I walk past. It’s one of the little treats that makes urban living bearable.
I don’t think anyone actually plants these trees for their fruit; they’re there for their foliage and their explosion of pink flowers in the early spring. And this year the explosion came a tad early. Along with the ornamental cherry* trees that were a little early blooming in Washington, DC and at Philadelphia’s West Fairmount Park, those plum trees responded in force to a warmer spell at the end of the winter.
If spring had then followed with unseasonable warmth, an army of honey bees, bumblebees, and carpenter bees would have been working their way through the flowers, sucking up nectar and packing in the pollen while in the process spreading some of that pollen from flower to flower. Watching those bees go to work on ornamental cherry and plum trees is one of my favorite porch-level nature observation pastimes. This year, though, the plum flowers bloomed and then fell in a pink flurry during a cool and damp spell that seemed to suppress the pollinators. I don’t know if the flowers actually got pollinated.
Spring lurches in with warm and cold weeks, and any year can be an off year, but I can’t help but wonder if I should give broader global warming some credit for that early warm spell and thus what could be an overall poor curb plum crop. It’s one of those “Oh, this is the kind of thing you read about” moments playing out on our block.
Our native, wild cherries and plums take more time to flower and should find plenty of pollinators active once they do. We haven’t been selectively breeding them for centuries to explode into bloom at the first hint of spring like we have the ornamental varieties. I’m not worried about them specifically.
But I am a little worried about other season timing problems that could be playing out where I can’t observe them so easily, say with some wild insect that ordinarily flies under the radar (in other words like the vast majority of insects) and its plant host that is now flowering (or sprouting, or fruiting) just a little too early.
*Plums and cherries are in the same genus Prunus, along with other stone fruit like peaches and apricots as well as almonds, which as a food are basically just edible peach pits.