Plum & Peach crossed gives you a ‘pleach’. Tastes like plum and peach mixed – looks like a peach with purple plum colour inside. These are very tasty stone fruits and have a lot of the advantages of both parents. They tend to be smaller than your average peach but the intense flavour makes up for it. And the juice is distinct purple. They are ideal for both cooking and eating fresh and make a great statement when they bleed juice into your vanilla ice-cream and yoghurts.

The tree is quite small but produces heavily and the birds don’t tend to notice to bother them till they approach ripe status! Maybe it’s the grey blue colour of the immature fruit…

When growing up at home we had three trees of this type growing out on the roadside verge. The fruit was even darker with a deep purple flesh all the way through. They were bulldozed at some stage after we moved out many years ago. I have not seen another one with the very dark flesh all the way through the fruit since – but am still looking.

These ones are just preserved in a very light sugar syrup. The colour becomes even more evident when cooked.

‘Pleach‘ also more commonly refers to the horticultural process of growing trees to plait or twist around each other to form shapes or fences.