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Prunus domestica subsp. insititia
(L.) Bonnier & Layens, Damson or Bullace

Account Summary

Introduction, archaeophyte, derived from planted material, occasional.

1900; West, W.; Drumskew Td, to the west of Enniskillen.

May to October.

Usually planted, sometimes in quantity, though occasionally perhaps self-sown and apparently well established and long-persistent in situations more remote from habitation. In the Revised Typescript Fermanagh Flora, the eight pre-1970s records of P. domestica were all without exception assigned by Meikle to subsp. insititia. There are now records of this subspecies in the Fermanagh Flora Database from 38 tetrads, 7.2% of those in the VC. Bearing this in mind, Damson, or rather its wild form, Bullace, is very slightly more frequent than what RHN and the current author (RSF) would regard as Wild Plum, P. domestica s.l., but both really are only occasional in Fermanagh, appearing on wood margins and hedgerows along roadsides, riverbanks and lakeshores. They display a very similar thinly scattered distribution mainly in the lowland east of the VC.

All forms of P. domestica, including the Plum (subsp. domestica), Bullace (or its cultivated form, Damson) and Greengage (subsp. italica (Borkh.) Gams ex Hegi) are hexaploids of hybrid origin, the triploid progeny of self-compatible, tetraploid P. spinosa (Blackthorn) (2n=32), crossed with self-incompatible diploid P. cerasifera Ehrh. (Cherry Plum) (2n=16), followed by chromosome doubling to arrive at hexaploid status (Stace et al. 2015). Although this hybrid probably occurred in other places besides the Caucasus region where it is common, the Cherry Plum is not a native species in B & I (Roach 1985, p. 144). Thus, all forms of this hybrid in these isles are undoubtedly ancient cultivated introductions, or subsequently derived forms.

Subsp. insititia is somewhat spiny and it has densely hairy twigs, whereas subsp. domestica has almost spineless, hairless twigs and a more flattened stone than subsp. insititia, the fruit of which is longer than broad and smaller than a plum stone (Hadfield 1957). However, life is rarely or really never this easy when hybrids are involved, since intermediate forms, developed from further generations of crosses abound. The extent of hybridisation between the two or three subspecies of P. domestica s.l. is so great in places that, in the New Flora of the BI (1997, 2019), Stace reckons character-correlation has partly broken down, often making the subspecies, "hardly discernible" in his view.

Fermanagh Occurence

Threats

None.