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History In Your Garden... This Week: Greengage (Prunus Domestica)

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  • History In Your Garden... This Week: Greengage (Prunus Domestica)

    HISTORY IN YOUR GARDEN... THIS WEEK: GREENGAGE (PRUNUS DOMESTICA)
    By Monty Don

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/ireland/artic le-1051337/History-garden--This-week-Greengage-pru nus-domestica.html
    01st September 2008

    In my opinion, greengages are the best of all plums. Unfortunately,
    they can be tricky to grow and young trees take their time to set
    fruit - but they are worth the trouble and the wait.

    Greengages can be tricky to grow and young trees take their time to
    set fruit

    It is believed that they originated in Armenia, just to the east of
    Turkey, and spread to Europe quite late, entering this country in
    the early 1700s - although there are references to the greengage
    before that time from travellers to Italy, where it was known as
    verdocchia. The French called it Reine-Claude after Queen Claude,
    wife of Francis I, whose reign overlapped that of our own Henry VIII.

    We know this green-skinned plum as the greengage because, in 1724, an
    English Catholic priest called John Gage, who was studying in Paris,
    sent some young trees to his brother, Sir William Gage, who lived at
    Hengrave Hall just outside Bury St Edmunds. But the trees lost their
    labels in transit so the gardener planted them and labelled them 'green
    Gages' after his master. The name stuck and has endured to this day.
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