Elephant Heart Plum

Elephant Heart was developed by Luther Burbank, using hand-pollination, from a Japanese plum cultivar at his Santa Rosa, California experimental farm sometime in the early 20th century — likely among the last plum varieties he ever worked on. Burbank died in 1926 before Elephant Heart was ever commercially released; Stark Brothers Nursery, entrusted with his remaining unreleased work, finally introduced it to the market in 1929, three years after his death. The name is a direct, literal reference to the fruit's shape, real heft, and deep purple-red color. It remains genuinely a boutique variety today, grown by a limited number of small farms, largely because the fruit must be hand-picked and hand-packed to avoid bruising, making it impractical for large-scale mechanized harvest. It has a real, notably short shelf life once ripe, which keeps it mostly out of large supermarket chains and concentrated at farmers markets and specialty grocers, primarily in California. The flesh is a deep, striking red, genuinely rich and juicy, with real, distinctive flavor notes that food writers have compared to vanilla, nutmeg, and tropical fruit.