Walking from Fort Funston to the Embarcardero — a variation of the iconic Crosstown Trail — is an exercise in discovery, even within the corners of San Francisco that you think you already know well.
If you’re lucky, a revelation will arrive at the exact moment when your legs are breaking down and your breath is growing heavy. That was me near the very top of Twin Peaks recently, walking through a fog so thick that it blocked out any view of the city. Then, I saw it: A plum tree, sagging with fruit, hiding behind a stone wall along the curving road.
The ruby orbs shimmered with dew, tantalizingly out of reach. I considered dropping into a thicket of thorns to harvest a few. I didn’t know yet that I would run into more plum trees along my route. One peeked up from a mess of shrubs at Buena Vista Park. Another was tucked into a yard along the Greenwich Steps that wind down from Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill. I’m sure I missed many more.
Bay Area summers are famous for local stonefruit, piled up in pyramids of gold, orange, and crimson at farmers markets citywide, but nothing compares to the plum boom that unfolds in yards, garden paths, hiking trails and hillsides around the Bay Area. Wild plums.
In my kitchen, I have a rapidly emptying bag of petite plums that came from a mature tree at a friend’s home in Marin. That tree was not planted by her family — it’s just stood on the property for years. These plums are the best stonefruit I’ve had in ages. The sack of fruit perfumes my kitchen with aromas of jasmine and honeysuckle. Their skins are thin and tart, with a tannic edge that makes your mouth water, as if you sipped a young red wine. The flesh is soft but never mealy. And they are delicious off the counter, but even better when left in the icebox (so sweet, so cold!)
Plums like this grow seemingly everywhere, even in urbanity with little active care from homeowners or passersby. My local source sits in a front yard at the top of a Castro hill, which I visit on occasional walks. In late summer, I sometimes channel a starving raccoon, standing on the sidewalk not-so-furtively while shoving quarter-sized plums into my mouth. I don’t feel bad about it, given the untouched fruit rotting on the ground. Someone’s got to do the hard work.
These trees aren’t the ones that explode with white and pink blossoms as winter turns to spring. Those were planted as ornamentals all over the city, adding to the ambience of neighborhoods and thoroughfares like Divisadero, but rarely producing plums. Instead, the fruit often come from Santa Rosa plum trees, developed in the Bay Area by Luther Burbank at the turn of the 20th century, or cherry plums, which produce marble-sized fruit and are considered invasive but not particularly harmful to native plants. They all thrive in the Bay Area’s Mediterranean climate where warm days and cool breezes meet the chill of night, deepening the flavors within the fruit’s translucent skin.
Whatever the type, they make me long for a time before stonefruit was bred for optimal storage and profit more than taste. Wild plums are less showy than their supermarket brethren, but offer a fragrance and high sugar content. Like our 7x7 city, these plums may appear puny to the uninitiated, but their intense flavor makes them perfect for cooking as much as eating out of hand. (I have a quart of plum pureé in my fridge, waiting for transformation.)
Look for the plums from now through late summer, before the trees go bare and the season makes way for all manner of other wild edibles. Early fall brings prized chanterelle and porcini mushrooms, which often sprout at the foot of redwood trees. You can harvest tender miner’s lettuce and teeny, sweet blackberries at Golden Gate Park. Sorrel and creeping bellflower, decorated with violet flowers, grow like weeds. Funky hybrid strawberry trees and citrus and loquats offer fruit in random parking lots.
The plums remain my favorite, of course. California produces the vast majority of the nation’s stonefruit, but the best remain in hiding on our streets and yards. With the season’s end around the corner, Bay Area plums are begging to be picked before they fall and go to waste.
In other words, happy hunting — right now.
