Chickasaw plum (Prunus angustifolia)

Also known as: sand plum

⚠️ Safety note: Eat only fully ripe fruit; underripe plums are mouth-puckeringly tart. Like all stone fruits, the pits contain amygdalin, so do not chew or crush the pits.

Quick Facts

• Edible parts: Ripe fruit (flesh)
• Part: fruit
• Season: Flowers February to March; fruit ripens late spring to early summer (roughly May to June).
• Type: tree
• Where in Florida: Statewide in sandy old fields, fence rows, and flatwoods edges, from the Panhandle to South Florida.

How to Recognize It

A thicket-forming small tree with zigzag twigs that blooms in clouds of white flowers in late winter before the leaves appear. The round plums are about an inch across and ripen from yellow to red. Look closely at the leaf edges: tiny glands sit at the tips of the marginal teeth, which separates it from flatwoods plum.

How to Eat It

Eat ripe, soft fruit raw when sweet-tart; it is classically cooked into jelly and jam with added sugar, and also used for wine.

Forms colonies, so harvest from the edges and leave fruit for wildlife; do not break branches.

Chickasaw plum blooms earlier in the year than its close cousin flatwoods plum, and the tiny glands on its leaf teeth are the field mark that tells the two apart.

🌱 Fun fact: Chickasaw plum is one of the parent species of many cultivated hybrid plums, valued by breeders for its disease resistance and adaptation to southern soils.

← Browse all edible native plants

🌿 Keep exploring

More Florida natives worth meeting:

• Allegheny chinquapin (Castanea pumila)
• Beautyberry (Callicarpa americana)
• Blackberry (Rubus argutus)

🌿 Also see the native-plant profile for this same species: Chickasaw Plum (Prunus angustifolia) — growing notes, habitat, and landscape use.