Make the most of summer’s stone fruit season with these simple ideas for lunch and pudding

Halfway down the garden, in the middle of the thick yew hedge, a wild plum tree is heavy with fruit, each one hanging like a bauble on a Christmas tree. The tree was never intentionally planted and is probably the result of my habit of throwing plum stones into the garden. The first I knew of it was an arching branch of snow-white blossom that appeared from the hedge one spring. Late each summer, its branches are bent low with chartreuse gages, the size of a thrush’s egg. Tiny and sweet as honey, the fruits are almost translucent in the late summer sunshine.

Plums have been trickling into the market, too – the rare Reine Claude, the purple-red Opal and the ubiquitous but welcome Victoria among them. Ripe and jelly-fleshed, there is rarely a plum I don’t like, but I appreciate them most in the kitchen, where they will be bubbled down into sauces for pork or duck, tucked under pastry crusts or oat-freckled crumbles or thrown into the jam pan with sugar, a cinnamon stick and a few cloves.