Holly A. Heyser
I see wild plums. They're everywhere. And people don't know they're plums.
Even I didn't know. When we moved to California, I began seeing these odd red trees—the whole tree is a deep burgundy. Weird. No one seemed to know what they were called. One of these trees grows two doors down from me in a neighbor's front yard. Walking to the gym in summer, I'd notice it would be festooned with scores of what, to all the world, looked like cherries.
No one ate them. Could they be bitter? Poisonous, even? Finally, last year at around this time, I screwed up my courage and ate one. Wow. Tart, sweet, and definitely not poisonous or bitter! These little things tasted like a cross between a cherry and a plum.
I looked them up: sure enough, the trees, which are planted literally everywhere around here, are prunus cerasifera, commonly known as the red-leafed or cherry plum.

Holly A. Heyser
Now that I know what they are I see them on every block, in nearly every shopping center, especially in the nearby town of Rancho Cordova, where there must be some ordinance promoting the planting of plums.
Thus the conundrum: almost all of them are on private property. My first foray for cherry-plums was in my neighborhood park, which has several trees dotted around it. Unfortunately, either this was an off year for the park trees or someone had picked them before me. All I got was a small produce bag of them, which Holly and I ate without further ado.