The spines are the proof.Sloe gin is a British red liqueur made with gin and sloes. A specimen, cut long ago from a hedge in county Limerick, just by the roadside, is as near as dammit to brown. In fact, the bark of the blackthorn varies in colour. And yet, and yet! The blackthorn stick of the more popular kind, the stick sold in tourist shops, is often a cod, a deception. The thorns are long and painful and potentially poisonous. Will we be lucky enough to get, this year as we did last year, and as was so pridefully announced, for the first time in decades, sloes (slight exaggeration, but only slight) as big as damsons?įor practical purposes, it makes, what is, to man and beast, an impenetrable hedge. In recent days, in this eastern part, the white blossom is to the fore. Only quince competes with it in this class. It adds piquancy to apple jelly in particular, and, its peak is perhaps in the liqueur, sloe gin.

The fruit is generally rejected, though not by jam makers or jelly makers. Or maybe a child has spat it out after tasting its bitter astringent flesh. You meet it now in hedges, in odd spots along a river where a bird, perhaps, had dropped the stone of a sloe. There are parts of Clare, in memory, which are made even more glorious by seas of the white blossom.

Edlin tells us that the orchard plum, prunus domestica, came about as a hybrid of that same cherry plum and the European blackthorn prunus spinoea.Īnd surely the blackthorn, not in gardens but throughout the country, in hedges, in odd spots in field corners, in land despised for almost anything else, is the real king. It is one of the beauties of suburbia that produces lovely fruit.

One of the finest of the whites is the cherry plum, called by Herbert l Edlin in The Tree Key, the Asiatic cherry plum. Pinks and whites and blossom laid on blossom. WHAT a wonderful show now of all those flowering trees, perhaps most noticeable in mass in suburbia.

Download sloe thorn