Prunus besseyi Bailey

A dwarf deciduous shrub 2 to 4 ft high, with glabrous branchlets. Leaves grey-green, oval or oval-lanceolate, sometimes obovate, 1 to 21⁄2 in. long, shallowly toothed on the upper two-thirds, glabrous. Flowers in stalkless clusters of two to four from the buds of the previous year’s shoots; each flower pure white, 5⁄8 in. across, on a stalk 1⁄3 in. long; calyx green, with ovate, slightly toothed lobes. Fruits on more or less pendent stalks, oblong or nearly round, 3⁄4 in. long, covered with a purplish bloom at first, finally black. Bot. Mag., t. 8156.

Native of the hot, dry plains east of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, etc., where it promises to be a valuable fruit-bearing shrub. It is remarkably prolific there, and in Colorado sixteen quarts of fruit have been gathered from a bush three years old, and eighty fruits from a branch 1 ft long. It was introduced to Kew in 1900, and has proved to be an ornamental little shrub, flowering so freely in late April or early May as to make each twig a cylindrical mass of blossom. Its fruits are only sparingly borne in England.