Paul Steinmetz, age 11, of Charlotte, North Carolina, for his question:
What kind of plant is the sloeberry?
Sloeberries grow on a variety of rather straggly plants, some of them bushes only three feet tall and others smallish trees as high as 15 feet. One variety or another is at home in almost every region across North America:. Chances are, you know your local sloe by another name.
Many people refer to their local sloe shrubs as blackthorns. Nature lovers have more precise names for the different varieties. The flatwood plum is native to the Carolinas and from there it ranges out in all directions. It grows wild in sandy woods and along the banks of streams and is known by at least two aliases, the hog plum and the black sloe. Its one to two inch leaves are wide in the middle and have sharply¬pointed tips. Like all the sloe leaves, their soft edges are notched like fine tooth saws. From late in February to early in April, the flatwood plum sloe is decked in clusters of smallish white flowers. By June or July, the blossoms have changed to roundish, purple red fruit about half an inch wide.
The American plum, a first cousin of the black sloe, crowds together in thickets in the woods, by the fences and streams throughout most of our central, southern and eastern regions. Its clusters of white flowers bloom in April and June and its fruit ripens in the fall. Its sloeberries may be yellow or red, roundish in shape and per¬haps an inch wide. The Allegheny plum belongs to the area between Connecticut and Virginia. Its white flowers bloom in the spring. Its round or oval sloeberries are a half inch wide and they ripen to dark, rich purple in August. This shrub may grow 15 feet tall. People call it the porter plum or just simply the sloe tree.
Other cousins of these sloe shrubs grow in America and also in other parts of the world. Many varieties are called plums, even though their sloeberries are smaller than our orchard plums and usually rather sour. But plums, wild plums, are just what they are. With about 2,000 other shrubs they belong to one of the most useful of all plant families. Their cousins include the apples and apricots, the peaches and pears, the cherries and other orchard trees. This plant family is named Rosaceae for its most glamorous member, the rose, loveliest flower in the world.
Fruit orchards take years to grow up and yield their juicy harvests. There were not many such orchards in pioneer days. But the people found many varieties of sloe¬berries growing in the wild. The sensible pioneers made the best use of them. They gathered .the ripe sloes and cooked them with honey or sugar to make jams and jellies. Some used recipes to make sloeberry wines. People who liked to weave fabrics often used the juices of different colored sloeberries to dye their threads.
All our useful plants are descended from wild trees and weedy ancestors. The sour little sloeberries may well be related to the wild ancestors of the sweet, juicy plums in our orchards. Through the ages, man the gardener has selected the best plants from the wilds and patiently improved them. But some of these pampered strains lose their sturdy qualities. This is one of the reasons why we have to graft the top of an improved strain of fruit tree onto the roots of a sturdy relative that can cope with the hardships of nature.