Plum trees
Avalon plum tree
Avalon is a large mid-season red/purple plum, similar to Victoria, with a very good flavour.Belle de Louvain plum tree
Belle de Louvain is a large purple culinary plum, useful because it can be grown on north-facing walls.Blue Tit plum tree
Blue Tit is a popular English dual-purpose plum, easy to grow, reliable cropping.Cambridge Gage plum tree
Cambridge Gage is a reliable green gage with an excellent flavour.Coe's Golden Drop plum tree
Coe's Golden Drop is a large oval gage from the 18th century, noted for its excellent flavour.Czar plum tree
Czar is a traditional culinary plum, one of the easiest plums trees, will even fruit on north-facing walls.Denniston's Superb plum tree
Denniston's Superb is a gage-like green plum, raised in New York in the 19th century.Early Transparent Gage plum tree
One of the easier gages to grow, Early Transparent has attractive semi-translucent fruit.Excalibur plum tree
Excalibur is a red-purple plum, similar to Victoria but with a better flavour for eating fresh.Guinevere plum tree
Guinevere is a modern late-season dessert plum, with a good flavour.Haganta plum tree
Haganta is a new large blue plum from Germany, one of the latest-ripening and an excellent flavour.Herman plum tree
Herman is one of the best quality early-season plum varieties, blue/purple with yellow flesh.Jefferson plum tree
Jefferson is a a large yellow gage / plum, easy to grow, crops well, very juicy and great flavour.Jubilee plum tree
Jubilee is a new dessert plum variety, similar to Victoria but larger and more reliable.Marjorie's Seedling plum tree
Marjorie's Seedling is an easy to grow, late-season, heavy cropping purple/black plum.Methley plum tree
Methley is a Japanese plum (Prunus salicina), as opposed to the more usual European plums (Prunus domestica).Old Greengage plum tree
The definitive gage - Old Green Gage is arguably the best-flavoured of any plum variety.Opal plum tree
Opal is an early plum variety with a good flavour, self-fertile and very easy to grow.Oullins Golden Gage plum tree
The flavour of a true gage yet also easy to grow, Oullins Golden Gage is a good first gage tree.Reine Claude de Bavay plum tree
The most widely-grown green gage, Reine Claude de Bavay has the distinctive gage-like flavour.Rivers' Early Prolific plum tree
Early Prolific is a very heavy-cropping early-season plum, raised by the famous Rivers nursery.Seneca plum tree
Seneca is a late-season large American plum with a notably sweet flavour.Valor plum tree
Valor is a large dual-purpose purple plum from Canada, ripening late in the season.Victoria plum tree
Victoria is the definitive English plum, attractive fruit, good for eating, superb for cooking.Warwickshire Drooper plum tree
Warwickshire Drooper is a good quality dual-purpose yellow plum, with heavy crops.Yellow Pershore plum tree
Also known as Yellow Egg, Yellow Pershore is a self-fertile heavy cropping culinary plum.More about Plum trees
If you are new to growing fruit trees, plum trees make an excellent choice. Plum trees are easy to grow - usually easier than apples and pears - and require very little training or pruning. The only horticultural challenge is that plums flower quite early in spring, so locations that are prone to frosts are best avoided (or choose a late-flowering or frost-resistant variety). They thrive in most conditions, but they prefer water-retentive soils, and mulching is therefore particularly important for plum trees - farmyard manure is ideal.
Unlike most apples and pears, many plum varietes are self-fertile or partially self-fertile and do not need a pollination partner. For plum varieties that are not self-fertile, another plum tree of a different variety flowering at the same time is usually all that is necessary to ensure good pollination and heavy crops - there are few of the pollination incompatibilities found with apples, pears and cherries.
Plums are also more nutrient-rich than apples or pears, and comparable to some other "superfoods" such as blueberries. Although plum trees do suffer from a range of diseases, they seem to catch them less often than other fruit varieties. Most important of all, the flavour of ripe home-grown plums is vastly superior to shop-bought fruit. Indeed in our opinion freshly-picked dessert plums can offer the most exquisite sweet flavours of any fruit available from the temperate garden.
We offer mostly 'European' plum trees - from the species Prunus domestica. European plums have a much better and more interesting range of flavours than the 'Japanese' plums usually found in supermarkets. Most garden plum trees in Northern Europe are of this species, and they are well suited to temperate climates, being hardier than the Japanese varieties and flowering later. Whilst European plums do not store particularly well, the fruit usually ripens over a 1-2 week period, during which time the tree can be picked daily to ensure a steady supply of fruit.
There is also a sub-group of European plums known as Gages, usually ranked within the species Prunus domestica, but sometimes sub-categorised as the "Reine Claude" group. Gage trees look similar to plum trees but the fruits are smaller and rounder than European plums, and either green or golden/yellow in colour. Gage trees prefer slightly warmer growing conditions than other European plums to bring out their full flavour, and their natural home is France - but they can be grown in any temperate climate. Gages have a unique distinctive rich sweet flavour, somewhat like an intense melon.