Latin Texts & Translations

Next comes a vast number of varieties of the plum, the parti-coloured, the black, ^[Note] the white, ^[Note] the barley ^[Note] plum—so called, because it is ripe at barley-harvest—and another of the same colour as the last, but which ripens later, and is of a larger size, generally known as the "asinina," ^[Note] from the little esteem in which it is held. There are the onychina, too, the

cerina, ^[Note]—more esteemed, and the purple ^[Note] plum: the Armenian, ^[Note] also an exotic from foreign parts, the only one among the plums that recommends itself by its smell. The plum-tree grafted on the nut exhibits what we may call a piece of impudence quite its own, for it produces a fruit that has all the appearance of the parent stock, together with the juice of the adopted fruit: in consequence of its being thus compounded of both, it is known by the name of "nuci-pruna." ^[Note] Nut-prunes, as well as the peach, the wild plum, ^[Note] and the cerina, are often put in casks, and so kept till the crop comes of the following year. All the other varieties ripen with the greatest rapidity, and pass off just as quickly. More recently, in Bætica, they have begun to introduce what they call "malina," or the fruit of the plum engrafted on the apple-tree, ^[Note] and "amygdalina," the fruit of the plum engrafted on the almond-tree, ^[Note] the kernel found in the stone of these last being that of the almond; ^[Note] indeed, there is no specimen in which two fruits have been more ingeniously combined in one.

Among the foreign trees we have already spoken ^[Note] of the Damascene ^[Note] plum, so called from Damascus, in Syria, but introduced long since into Italy; though the stone of this plum is larger than usual, and the flesh smaller in quantity. This plum will never dry so far as to wrinkle; to effect that, it needs the sun of its own native country. The myxa, ^[Note] too,

may be mentioned, as being the fellow-countryman of the Damascene: it has of late been introduced into Rome, and has been grown engrafted upon the sorb.