_Prunus maritima_, or as it has long been known, the Beach plum, is as yet hardly grown as a domesticated fruit. It is destined, however, in the minds of not a few, because of qualities which we shall describe, to play a more important part in the future of the cultivated plum flora than it has in the past. It has several valuable characters that should fit it alike for direct cultivation and for hybridizing with other species. It is surprising that more has not been done to domesticate the Maritima plums for they were among the first fruits noticed by early explorers and have always been used by both Indians and Whites for culinary purposes. The fact that Domestica plums thrive in their habitat is the only explanation of the non-amelioration of this plum before this. September third, 1609, Hudson entered the river bearing his name and found “a very good harbor, abundance of blue plums, some currants brought by the natives dried and the country full of great and tall oaks.” The blue plum was the Maritima; and from Hudson’s time nearly all of the accounts of the New World given by early explorers mention this plum. It is probably one of the plums described by Captain John Smith as a cherry “much like a Damson;” by Edward Winslow in 1621, in a letter to England to a friend, as one of his “plums of three sorts”; by Francis Higginson in his _New England’s Plantation_ in 1630; described by Thomas Morton in 1632 in his _New English Canaan_ as having “fruit as bigg as our ordinary bullis.” John Lawson, one of the first of American naturalists, describes them rather more fully as follows:[140] “The American Damsons are both black and white, and about the Bigness of an European Damson. They grow any where if planted from the Stone or Slip; bear a white blossom, and are a good fruit. They are found on the Sand-Banks all along the Coast of America. I have planted several in my Orchard, that came from the Stone, which thrive well amongst the rest of my Trees. But they never grow to the Bigness of the other Trees now spoken of. These are plentiful Bearers.” These are but a few of the many references to the Beach plum but they are enough to show that the colonists were attracted by this wild plum found on a long stretch of the Atlantic seaboard—probably the first fruit to attract attention from Virginia to New England.