Story behind the art of Karen Kluglein
Botanical Art Worldwide 2025-A More Abundant Future:
Diversity in Garden, Farm, and Field
American Society of Botanical Artists at the Foundry Art Centre, St. Charles, MO
Beach Plum Jam
Prunus maritima
I have lived on the East End of Long Island, New York for many years, and while I always knew about its native beach plums I never paid much attention to them and did not seek them out. When I learned of the exhibition, A More Abundant Future, I thought that perhaps beach plums could be a relevant subject to paint. Fortunately for me, my husband knew which sandy dunes at the beach to find them on, and my daughter was interested in making jam from the plums. The first fruits I saw were ripe and homogenous in color, but upon further exploration we discovered sections of shrubs that had plums of varying jewel-like colors all growing from a single branch. There were golden yellows, greens, pinks, burgundies, and some very dark purples, often with beautiful bloom. They were exquisite and I could not believe my luck in finding these beauties! We picked many of the dark, ripe plums for jam and I photographed the fruits, leaves, and branches of various plants both at the beach and then later at home for reference.
The fruits are roughly the size of big grapes. At first my intention was to paint them larger than life, though not quite as large as they were ultimately painted. I even began a small sketch but decided there was so much detail within each plum that would be lost if they were painted smaller. I broke a rule I have for myself to not paint subjects significantly larger than life size because they can look weird. And the beach plums do look weird! Often when I look at the painting I think the orb-like beach plums look like unusual colorful planets. When painting something large in scale it takes a long time to paint and can get boring to look at for days on end. Once the painting was started I forced myself to push through and at times, to be honest, it was a little torturous to look at the same thing for so many hours! There were many days I did not want to work on it, and it took quite a few months to complete for this reason.
The beach plum is an ancient fruit-bearing shrub native to the coastal mid-Atlantic and northeastern regions of the US, from Maine to Maryland. Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazano first documented the shrubs in 1524 and referred to them as “damson trees.” The fruits served as an abundant late-summer wild food source for Native Americans and European colonists alike, who used them both fresh and dried. The beach plum was amongst the first of the New World plants the colonists saw in the 1600s.
While people tried to create cultivars with better fruiting properties in the 1800s, the beach plum is still today a largely unexploited plant. There have been multiple attempts to domesticate the beach plum for production, but the results have been mixed at best. In the 1930s, the agricultural cooperative Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc. produced beach plum jelly but abandoned the product after unpredictable variations in the crop occurred. The wild beach plum may bloom profusely one year and not the next, the taste of the berries is not consistent, and the plant requires cross pollination by bees or flies for good fruit to set. On the bright side, beach plums have few pests and are salt tolerant and cold hardy. Deer, birds, squirrels, chipmunks, opossums, foxes, raccoons, and coyotes like them too!
Beach plums have a hint of sweetness and a lot of tartness, much like cranberries. They can be made into jams and jellies, wine and cordials. With the resurgence of foraging and the local food movement, beach plums are experiencing a revival. Today you are most likely to find the preserves at a farmers market or farm stand.
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Read more about this artist's work:27th Annual