This morning’s breakfast fruit, mixed with yoghurt and granola, included raspberries, Asian pear, Bosc pear, a tasty heirloom apple planted three years ago whose variety I cannot remember, and a very yellow peach, all picked here. There is something lovely about foraging your breakfast fresh every morning.

You may recall that I announced the end of peach season several weeks ago. So I believed. But growing things always has a way of bringing surprises. The peach we ate this morning was harvested from what I believed to be a Shiro plum tree.

For years, we had two lovely shiro plum trees. We planted them just east of the driveway soon after buying the place. They were abundant producers. These small shiny yellow plums were delicious. When ripe, extremely juicy, but still a little tarty and quite plummy. (Just the way I would hope to be described myself!)

Four or five years ago, the plum trees began to develop galls on many of the branches, sort of canker sores. My reading suggested that many tree galls are pretty harmless, but because the branches with the galls were dying off these did not seem so. We made assiduous efforts to cut off the branches with the galls and burn them, but over time more and more of the trees’ branches were affected. Two years ago a visiting arborist suggested the trees were irredeemable and should come down. I can’t now remember the source of infection she gave as causing the galls, but she said it was airborne and endemic .

After the trees came down, one of the two stumps remained alive and continued to send up shoots. I saw no reason not to let that process unfold. What happened is a now head-high bushy tangle of branches (pictured above) that this year produced fruit. It was a yellow fruit that I naturally assumed would start getting shiny as it ripened and become a shiro plum. At some point in the last few weeks I realized the fruit would never get shiny, and was way too large to be shiro plums. Instead, this week, we’ve enjoyed some large yellow peaches.

And what an appropriate week to be enjoying this fruit. Serendipitously, this morning I heard the title song of the 1974 album, Front de Libération des Arbres Fruitiers (the Fruit Tree Liberation Front), by the Belgian poet and singer Julos Beaucarne (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julos_Beaucarne). This gifted artist died earlier this week and the Montreal radio station Ici Musique was commemorating his life. My visiting friend Éric assured me that Beaucarne’s song was no joke, but was rather a protest song, honoring the efforts of those who resisted a government effort to have farmers cut down their fruit trees and convert to other types of agricultural production. I imagine my saving this tree stump to allow creation of a new fruit tree would earn me honorary membership in the Liberation Front.

But how did the plum tree become a peach tree? It didn’t take long learn that plum trees are often grown on root stock of other stone fruits, including peaches. This is usually accomplished through “budding”, a process akin to grafting, in which buds of plum branches are inserted in to the root stock. This is how the novelty products you see in nursery catalogues, such as trees which produce four different varieties of plum on one tree, are created.

Pretty clearly, my plum trees were grown on the root stock of a very late season peach. By chopping the tree back to the stump, I allowed it to revert to type and express its innate peachiness. (A quality I, too, try to personally cultivate). I plan to let this new growth develop, trimming it into a tree shape, and extend in future years the peach season I’ve enjoyed so much this year.

Much good apparently can come of cutting things back to their essence. Last night, capping off a lovely week-long visit, Éric treated me to dinner at a lovely small country restaurant in Pine Plains, Champêtre. The proprietors, Michel and Patri