Fortieth Street is the backbone of our neighborhood, connecting Mosswood to the south with Temescal to the north. On the sunny side of Fortieth and Webster, you’ll find Oakland Yard’s front yard, where you can sip wine at our sidewalk tables seven days a week. Many of our cross streets - Ruby, Emerald, Opal and Garnet - are named for gemstones, so some folks call our neck of the woods the Jewel Box. During the late 1800’s, short sections of what are now Webster and Shafter Avenues were called Gold Street and Silver Street, and Manila Avenue was once known as Diamond Street.

Last month, our trees were bare and our roads were still ‘slow streets’ blocked with plastic placards and sandbags. The slow streets were fun for a while, but they worked better in some places than others, and made our busy corner more clogged and dangerous than slow. After so long in place, the ugly, haphazard blockades seemed to symbolize the intractability of the pandemic, and our misplaced efforts to combat it, and to see our thoroughfares now unencumbered is an unexpected balm, a weight lifted, a clear sign of movement and relief. In addition to the free flow of traffic, you’ll also notice as you stroll around the Jewel Box, that our local flora’s begun its blooming, with majestic purple magnolias, bursting yellow acacias, and, most conspicuously, the pink blossoms of our decorative plum trees. What they lack in fruit, they more than make up for in beauty, with a transporting, near-forgotten feast for winter eyes, a true emblem of renewal.

Prunus is the genus of trees and shrubs which includes plums, cherries, peaches, nectarines, apricots and almonds. Cultivated for thousands of years, plums may have been one of the first fruits domesticated by humans. The common European plum, Prunus domestica, probably originated in eastern Europe, around the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea, and this region still has a strong cultural connection with the fruit. In Hungary, Serbia and Croatia, they make plum and potato dumplings and distill a prized plum brandy called Slivovitz. In the Georgian Republic, the most common condiment is a spiced plum sauce called Tkemali, and they have an ancient recipe for line-dried plum fruit leather, called Tklapi.

The agricultural history of eastern Europe also boasts an ancient winemaking culture - perhaps the oldest in the world. In 2017, archeological excavations in southern Georgia unearthed terra cotta jars, known as Qvevri, from the 6th century BCE, which means Georgians have been making wine for 8,000 years, predating the Greeks and the Romans. We’ve always felt these wines provide a fascinating counterpoint to those of western Europe and the New World, and we’ve got a fresh batch coming into Oakland Yard this week from Slovenia, Hungary, and the Republic of Georgia. If you’ve had enough Chardonnay and Pinot Noir from wooden barrels, and you’re in the mood for some Tsitska or Tsolikauri aged in clay qvevri, just follow the plum flowers to Fortieth and Webster and come find us on the sunny side.

Gaumarjos!
Max