Lynda Hallinan has donned her investigative 'Dr Watson' hat to solve the mystery of the Black Doris plum.

OPINION: Do family trees, like fruit trees, benefit from pruning? In every family, there are profligate croppers and barren limbs; branches cleft together by convenience; and the occasional rogue shoot, a source of shame and scandal, to be quietly cut off.

My grandfather, Percy, was five years old when his mother abandoned her three young sons for stilettos, fox furs and the stage. She buggered off to be an actress and dancer in the Pollard Opera Company's travelling troupe.

My father was told that his grandmother Kathleen was dead, only to later learn that she was alive if not well. She was locked up in a mental ward in Porirua, where she died in 1954, leaving a legacy wholly out of keeping with our family's rural heritage.

Lynda Hallinan has been pondering the mysterious parentage of Aotearoa's most-loved plum.

By all accounts, my thrice-married, red-haired great-grandmother was a right looker, a long-legged can-can dancer who could high-kick out a lightbulb as a party trick.

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Although you can trace your roots through the Department of Internal Affairs, DNA testing and Ancestry.com, things aren't always what they seem.

Black Doris plums can be traced back to a a sometime milk vendor, farmer and bricklayer called Lewis John Billington.

This is equally true in an orchard, although the stories of some heirloom fruit trees – like the legendary 'Peasgood's Nonsuch' apple – are easy to trace. This classic English cooker was raised from a pip sown by Mrs Emma Peasgood of Grantham, Lincolnshire, and given its name when a chap from the Royal Horticultural Society took one look at its large fruit and declared there was "nonesuch like it".

However other heirlooms, like New Zealand's iconic 'Black Doris' plum, refuse to yield their ancestry despite the investigative persistence of a green-fingered journalist (me) and a celebrity quizmaster and historian (Max Cryer).

Max, Sherlock, me, Holmes: for 533 fruitless days, we've been pondering the mysterious parentage of Aotearoa's most-loved plum.

Black Doris plums are highly versatile - and can produce a velvety red wine, not too dissimilar from a Merlot.

You see, when legendary American plant breeder Luther Burbank bred the original 'Doris' plum in the late 1800s, she was red-skinned and yellow-fleshed and not at all like the deep purple plum in Wattie's cans. We knew 'Doris' was introduced to New Zealand in 1895 or 1896, and was enthusiastically propagated, but of her darkening demeanour, we knew diddly squat.

In August of 2016, I issued a public plea on this page. "Somewhere, someone in New Zealand must know who grew the first 'Black Doris'," I begged.

That column prompted a windfall of letters and encouraging emails – 5884 words in all, including enough red herrings to fill a smoked fish pie – but no definitive answer.

I did, however, get some good tips. Wrote Jonathan Harker, "I have discovered that juicing ripe 'Black Doris' plums, adding a little champagne yeast, sticking it in oak for a few months, and bottling it for three years makes an amazing, complex, dark purple-red, velvety plum wine, reminiscent of a good merlot."



Former sales rep Geoff Matthews also supplied a new lead when he recalled 'Black Doris' plums growing at Wyona Canneries in Hawke's Bay. "Alas," Max reported back, "in 1977 Wyona was sold to the Henry Berry group, who then on-sold it to Wattie's, who closed it down. I managed to locate one of the original firm's sons, who worked in the cannery for years, and he recalls 'Black Doris' plums being very popular as far back as 1955."

After that, the trail went as cold as Kāpiti's Black Doris plum and & crème fraîche ice cream until this month, when an email popped up in my inbox from the treasurer of the Clevedon Garden Circle.

"Hi Lynda," wrote Paddy Franklin. "I was having a conversation about fruit with my brother when he casually mentioned that the 'Black Doris' plum was named after a neighbour of one of my sisters."

Doris, Paddy revealed, was the youngest daughter of Lewis John Billington (1884-1955). "He was a sometime milk vendor, farmer and bricklayer on the Waitakere dams. He also liked his garden and playing around with the grafting of plums, it would appear."

In a most peculiar coincidence, I was actually in Clevedon when Paddy's email arrived, buying none other than – cowinkydink! – 'Black Doris' plums to bottle.

Clevedon artist Katie Blundell, whose studio sits in a craggy old plum orchard, sells them from a retro caravan in front of her gallery. (Her latest exhibition, which opens next weekend as part of Auckland's Pride Festival, is called Fruity. See katieblundellartist.com or clevedonarttrail.co.nz.)

I bought four large punnets of Katie's plums to bottle with cinnamon, cloves and cardamom, for the only thing sweeter than a successfully settled stumper is a breakfast bowl of 'Black Doris' compote with coconut yoghurt and muesli.

Said Carl Jung, "Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with."