[TonyW]

It's a while since the posts about bullace but I've just come across them and would like to comment.

There seems to be a lot of uncertainty about bullace and damson, what the differences are and whether there really are differences. When we lived near the Chilterns in both Bucks and Oxfordshire there were many trees I understood were bullace. They grow to at least 20 feet and the fruits are dark purple, oval in shape and up to an inch long. There are others which are very similar but the fruits are rounder. I call these the "Bledlow Bullace" because that's where I first saw them, but I've subsequently found them elsewhere in the district. The two types may be found close to each other.

On the hills above Chinnor there is one large tree with slightly larger round fruit ("The Giant Bullace of Chinnor Hill" to our family), while at Longwick near Princes Risborough is a group of trees with a version of the oval fruit that's smaller than usual. There's another of these trees near Bledlow.

Living now in North Hampshire I've so far found only one group of bullace trees, these having the smaller oval fruit.

The fruits I believe are bullace ripen by late September. They are somewhat sharp in taste but are basically eatable - not bitter as sloes are. They become riper and sweeter if left for another two or three weeks but equinoctial gales may cause most of them to fall.

If you look at various sources you will find conflicting information - some will say that bullace is round and damson is oval, and others the other way round. In some cases a clinging stone is said to be a feature of bullace while damson is semi-clinging or free; others tell you that both have a clinging stone. The Keepers Nursery website which has much interesting information describes the Langley Bullace as "best regarded as a small damson". This presupposes that there is a definite distinction, but the result of consulting several sources is confusion rather than distinction.

I think the probability is that there's a spectrum of varieties of these trees, all different from sloes in having larger sweeter fruit, larger leaves, probably fewer thorns, and reaching a greater height. But I'm not entirely confident about that statement, having come across trees which apparently are intermediate between blackthorn and bullace - taller, larger leaves, few thorns, but the fruit tasted similar to sloes. There may be, or have been in the past, distinctive differences between the bullaces around one village and those around another.

To complicate things still further, there are bullaces with green or whitish fruit, as fbpcmike explains above and as on the Keepers Nursery website. Interestingly, the fruit in fbpcmike's pictures looks very like that on trees along the embankment of the former railway (now the Phoenix Trail) near Thame. I've always considered the bullace to be the smaller purple fruit I've referred to above. It proved easy to get the green fruit from the railway bank to produce a new tree and we have one in our garden, but I've rarely been able to get the purple bullace to grow from a stone and the tree of that type that we have was grown from a cutting.

Odonata who started this thread said he/she was intrigued, and I may have made the situation even more intriguing. And the fruit eaten on a Shropshire farm might actually have been a variety called the Shropshire Prune.