,’ sighed Pliny the Elder in his, referring to ‘the enormous crowds of plums’ in a lush Roman garden. Because, among his accounts of ‘Sea Monsters of the Indian Ocean’, the ‘Combat of Elephants’, ‘Instances of Extraordinary Strength’ and ‘When Barbers were First Employed’, he describes fruits of black, white and ‘parti-coloured’; the Armenian, and the ‘Barley’, the damson from Damascus, the ass, the wax, ‘esteemed cerina’, even the amygdalina, a possibly fabulous combination of almond and plum. An abundance of juice-heavy delight, of hue, scent, size and flavour, a
