PLUMS RIPEN, 203 



XXXIV. 

 PLUMS RIPEN. 



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 resemblance ; yet the one 

 is really the cultivated offspring of the other, and their 

 history is consequently the same throughout at least 

 until we arrive at its penultimate chapter, with the first 

 domestication, 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 straw- 

 berry plant, only without its peculiar juicy and succu- 

 lent fruit. A long course of unrecorded development 

 in the progenitors of the plum kind has made their 

 stems grow constantly woodier and woodier, by 

 numerous stages which we can still roughly trace 

 through every gradation of herb, shrub, bush, and tree 

 throughout an immense collection 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 



