We got about 50 lbs of Gracious plums from the old tree I grafted and planted the same year as the Waneta and Kahinta. I obtained the scionwood for all three hardy, hybrid-type plums in about 1982. It was long before any DNA profiling, and there was not a lot of widespread interest in the hybrids.

Kahinta and Waneta and most other hybrid plums were crossed, selected and introduced by Niels Hanson during the first half of the twentieth century. Gracious was one of the few exceptions. It was selected at the Northern Great Plains Field Station in Mandan, ND, in 1957. It is a cross of two hybrids, both of which include the Japanese plum, “Burbank” as one parent.

I began to suspect that our Gracious might be incorrect some years later when I became familiar with the fruit. The fruit was delicious, but the literature said that Gracious was freestone. Our “Gracious” was not freestone. Freestone hybrid plums are rare. Had I received the wrong wood? Did I mix up the scions when grafting? I had obtained scionwood from a few dozen different plum cultivars that year, but none of the others turned out to be freestone either. This evening I poked around on the internet and found a few sites that include information about Gracious. One is the Montana Fruit Company. Maybe it’s time to purchase a tree of their Gracious, wait a few years, and see if theirs is… freestone.

We had a funny weather pattern today, one not picked up on at all by the official weather folks. They showed zero chance of rain all day, but we had showers—some heavy—throughout the day. Was it really raining? I’m pretty sure it was!