XXXIV. 



PLUMS KIPEN. 



THE blue plums in the garden have now acquired their 

 ripe purple bloom, and their cousins the sloes on the 

 blackthorn bushes in the copse are fast softening to such 

 sour pulpiness as their wild nature ever permits them. 

 In outer look the plum-tree and the sloe-bush do not 

 present any very close resemblaace ; yet the one is really 

 the cultivated offspring of the other, and their history is 

 consequently the same throughout at least until we ar- 

 rive at its penultimate chapter, with the first domestica- 

 tion, so to speak, of the eastern sloes by man. Plums 

 and sloes are roses by family, descended from original 

 creeping ancestors not unlike the wild strawberry plant, 

 only without its peculiar juicy and succulent fruit. A 

 long course of unrecorded development in the progeni- 

 tors of the plum kind has made their stems grow con- 

 stantly woodier and woodier, by numerous stages which 

 we can still roughly trace through every gradation of 

 herb, shrub, bush, and tree throughout an immense col- 

 lection of diverse congeners. From simple little weedy 

 annuals, which die down entirely every winter, and are 

 reproduced next year by seed alone, we pass on upward 

 through perennials with slightly woody underground 

 stocks, sending forth fresh flowering steins with each re- 

 turning spring, to small tough under-shrubs whose 

 branches alone die down in autumn, and finally to arbo- 

 rescent bushes, all of whose stiff er boughs become perma- 

 nently woody from the very first. And side by side 



