Plum, 6th of September 2015.

I painted two plums on a little branch with couple of leaves (above) on 29th of July this year. The vacation had just started. When I finished painting, I ate them, though they were not ripe. I ate plums also today, but these late-summer ones are already mushy, sweet and almost without sour notes. I prefer plums which are, according to majority taste, still not ripe.

Leaves on a cut branch quickly lose their liveliness, bow down and curl in, they take on the configuration which does not even resemble the initial pencil sketch. In my experience, plums are even particularly resilient in that respect. Leaves of pears e.g. dry out and crumple much more quickly.

Plums change their color completely when thoroughly wiped. Before wiping they are blueish, and one such unwiped part of the plum can also be seen in the image above (right part of the more distant plum). When they are wiped properly they become dark violet with transitions to orange and yellow-green where the fruit tissue is less ripe. Plums can have different colors - there are almost black ones, yellow and green, even when they are completely ripe. The "dusty" coating of an unwiped plum is fruit wax. Its hydrophobic chemistry repels water so that the fruit never gets wet. This is something similar to >> "lotus effect" - in the case of lotus the effect is stronger (so called "superhydrphobic") because the hydrophobic matter is also nano-structured.

According to >> Wikipedia there are between 19 and 40 species of plum (with all the difficulties of defining a "specie", of course). Subspecies and cultivars are much more numerous. The country which produced most plums in year 2013 was China. On the second place was Serbia, and on the seventh Bosnia and Hercegovina.

The plums shown below were painted in year 1815 by British botanical illustrator William Hooker (1779 - 1832) and they were published in the collection known as Hooker's Fruits. The painted variants of plums were denoted by Hooker as La Royale Plum and Wilmot's Early Violet Plum.

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Last updated on 6th of September 2015.