The lilacs have long since faded here.

In case of doubt, its extremely beguiling scent would have helped to identify it, which was not difficult anyway given the leaves and purple umbels.

The acacia tree, which is armed with spines, is now also developing pairs of pinnate leaves, making it easy to identify them, but a bush is a long time coming before it blossoms - and I'm still puzzled as to which plant it is in my new garden.

Sonya Kastilan

Editor in the "Science" department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

  • Follow I follow

So far it looks very promising, but appearance is not everything: With its delicate, light pink flowering branches, a spring tamarisk (

Tamarix parviflora

) has great charm, but this one was crooked and much too dense.

One fine Sunday I made short work of it as best I could get the deep root with the spade.

Their disappearance allowed a castling in the bed: The small bee-friendly rose slipped to the left, in its place there is now a young

Prunus domestica

subsp.

syriaca

Mirabelle de Nancy.

Patience is the virtue of all gardeners

A bountiful harvest may be too much to ask for in the first year, but without patience you are lost in gardening anyway.

If, for example, the lily, gladioli or dahlia bulbs and other rootstocks first have to be watered for a few hours before they are sunk into the ground in a manner appropriate to their species, only to completely forget about them overnight, so that as a novice I now have to hope that they still or that's why they thrive and I'm sure I soon forgot where the tubers or rhizomes were buried - and how many there were.

The alternative would be to draw up a battle plan, true to scale, or stick colorful flags in the ground, which were once in vogue for cheese cubes - at about the same time as the tamarisk tree was used as a front garden ornament.

However, I found it excessive to label every spot meticulously and weatherproof.

I'd rather be surprised.

The situation is similar with my fruit bushes and the mirabelle plum, with which I would like to fulfill a long-cherished wish.

The garden would be too small for Greengage or, better yet, a Reine Claude d'Oullins or de Bavay, and their shade would eventually be too large, so a small, yellow plum seemed a much better choice.

And if a specimen can survive for decades in Berlin's harsh climate, supplying a restaurant there in Schöneberg's Akazienkiez with enough stone fruit for a couple of tarts every year, then surely in the mild Rhine-Main area?

At the time of its flowering and fruit ripening, a Mirabelle neither appreciates heavy rain nor wind;

it survives cold winters, and those trees that have been cultivated in Spain's north-west since the 1930s have their origin in the Black Forest, where mirabelle plums are also often "ghosted", but they do not come from here, but presumably from the southern Caucasus like the whole kind. In the 15th century it is said to be King René I.,

Duke of Lorraine and Anjou, brought back from a trip;

Metz and Nancy became their new homes, from where the Mirabelle conquered Central Europe.

First Lorraine, then all of Central Europe

The beginnings of European plum culture with

Prunus domestica

go back to the Neolithic and are considered confused;

Roman scholars documented, for example, diverse fruit imports from Syria and Persia.

True wild forms do not exist, so American geneticists took 405

Prunus

representatives, including umpteen variants of

P. domestica,

which are probably themselves a hexaploid hybrid of

P. cerasifera

(cherry plum, diploid) and

P. spinosa

(sloe, tetraploid). originated with the involvement of another, so far unexplained species, and was selectively selected early on.

P. simonii

, native to China

is in any case not a close relative, as the family tree analyzes showed.

In 2019, they presented their studies on the Eurasian relationship and the various influences as well as four new subgroups for

P. domestica

in the journal "Horticulture Research" : the "Greengages" with greengages, European plums and damsons, the French d'Agen prunes - and mirabelle plums .