| Food and drink specialities |
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 The perfect Prune > History of the Dried Plum > Pellier’s Gardens
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| Louis PELLIER |
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Joined by his brother Pierre in 1851, Pellier’s nursery, later widely know as “Pellier’s Gardens,” was to revolutionise Santa Clara Valley. Longing for fine trees like those of his native France, in 1853, Louis sent his brother Pierre back to France to for a supply of cuttings and seeds.
Potato-snuggled smuggled plum-trees
Three years later, Pierre returned with two trunks filled with cuttings and seeds, the scions being stuck into potatoes whose moisture would help keep the cuttings alive. That winter, Louis Pellier grafted the scions on selected rootstock. Fortunately, some of the grafts lived, chief among them being the Pruneau d' Ente, grown in the Agen district of his homeland.
As the seasons turned, the patient work of the Pellier brothers began to bear fruit and a great industry was born, an industry from which the bulk of today's dried plum crop is derived –making California the largest dried plum producing area in the world.
Pellier’s fruitful heritage
California is indebted to Louis Pellier, not only for the French Prune but also, to a great extent, for the beginnings of many fruit orchards and vegetable gardens of Santa Clara Valley. Today, there are more than 80,000 high production acres concentrated in the Californian valleys. Currently, these acres produce more than twice as many dried plums as the rest of the world combined: approximately 99 percent of the U.S. supply and 70 percent of the world supply.
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