Wild Goose PlumWILD GOOSE

With its large bright red fruit—the largest and tastiest of any Native plum—the Wild Goose plum was the most active market variety of Chickasaw in the nineteenth century.  Ripening in early June  in the deep South and late June in Kentucky it was one of the first to appear on produce stalls. According to J. S. Downer it first appeared near Columbia TN in the late 1840s.  Legend holds that it came from the craw or a wild goose [but stories about seeds found in killed wildfowl are rife in the Appalachians and must be taken with a grain of salt.]   [“Wild Goose Plum,” Prairie Farmer 46, 7 (February 13, 1875), 50.]   The fame of the original tree led to multitudes of scions and pits being disseminated.  Those Wild Goose Plums grown from seed tended to be quite variable in taste and quality. Nurserymen began making selections on the finest tasting and hardiest growing strains as early as the mid 1880s.   In the twentieth century the strain was recognize as being sufficiently distinct from the augustafolia as to merit its own botanical designation (Prunus munsoniana). The name recognized Texas fruit breeder T. V. Munson. A particularly excellent line is available through Oikos Tree Crops  https://oikostreecrops.com/products/wild-goose-plum/

Trees are "characterized by strong widespreading growth and mostly smooth twigs; a firm , juicy, bright-colored, thin-skinned fruit, which is never flattened; a clinging, turgid, comparatively small, rough stone, which is sometimes prolonged at the ends but is never conspicuously wing-margined, and by comparatively thin and firm shining, flat, and more or less peach-like , ovate-lanceolate or ovate-long pointed leaves, which a mostly closely and obtusely glandular-serrate, and the stalks of which are usually glandular" [Frank Waugh, Plums and Plum Culture (1901), 68.]  The trees are self sterile. 

Image: U.S. Department of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection. Rare and Special Collections, National Agricultural Library, Beltsville, MD 20705, Amanda Newton, 1910

David S. Shields