Indian Blood Peach: The Purple Peach You've Never Heard Of

Cut an Indian Blood peach in half and it looks more like a beet than a peach. The skin is a dusky purple-red, and the flesh inside runs from deep red at the skin to streaked pink and white near the stone.

It's one of the oldest peaches grown in North America. It was growing here centuries before today's grocery store peaches were bred, and it's been passed along from pit to pit for about four hundred years. Most people have still never seen one, because the fruit is too soft and too quick to spoil to ship.

I grow Indian Blood peaches at my place in Oklahoma, in zone 7. I love the way they taste, and they've been super easy to grow here. So here's the story of the tree, how it grows and what the fruit is like.

Indian Blood peach at a glance

Zones, chill hours and ripening dates are from Dave Wilson Nursery ↗, whose harvest dates are for central California. Expect yours to shift with your climate.

Where the Indian Blood peach came from

Peaches aren't native to North America. Spanish colonists brought them over in the 1500s, and Monticello's gardeners trace this red one to Mexico in the sixteenth century.

What happened next is the reason for the name. Native growers took up the peach and carried it north. By the 1600s, European explorers in the Southeast were astonished to find Native people already growing this Old World fruit. It grew so easily in the wild that it was taken for a native American tree.

Food historian David Shields calls it the "first American peach." He writes that it's sometimes called the Cherokee Blood peach in the upland South, though the Muskogee were probably its most devoted growers, and that most of the peach pits dug up at early Southeastern sites are likely some form of it.

Thomas Jefferson grew it too. He ordered Indian Blood trees in 1807 from Thomas Main, a Washington nurseryman who described the fruit as "very large and excellent." It still grows in the South Orchard at Monticello.

It has cousins in Europe. France has old red-fleshed peaches like Sanguinole and Sanguine de Manosque. Shields says nobody has done the genetic work yet to tell how closely they're related.

Why it survived for four hundred years

Almost every fruit tree you can buy is grafted. Plant a seed from a grocery store apple and you'll get a tree, but the apples won't be anything like the one you ate.

Indian Blood is different. Plant the pit and the tree that comes up is close to its parent. That's how it traveled. Nobody needed a nursery or a grafting knife, just a few pits to carry to the next town, and the peach moved around that way for generations.

It also means the trees aren't identical. Shields describes it as a landrace, a family of closely related trees with some spread in quality. Some bear better fruit than others, and the red can run from light streaks to solid color.

What the fruit is like

The outside is fuzzy and dark, somewhere between red and purple with a gray bloom over it. I don't think it looks like much until you cut it.

Inside, the flesh is streaked and marbled with red. On some peaches the color runs in stripes from the skin to the stone, and on others it soaks the whole fruit. Monticello's description says the fruit is splashed and mottled with scarlet, tiger-like stripes, and that the skin resembles a beet.

I love the way these taste. They aren't like a store peach, though, so here's what to expect.

It's a clingstone, so the flesh hangs on to the pit and you cut it away with a knife. That's normal for canning peaches.

It's tart as well as sweet. Shields describes the flavor as acid and sweet together, with a bold sour note under a sugary finish. Modern peaches have had most of that tartness bred out (on purpose).

How big they get depends on the crop. A tree loaded with fruit makes small peaches, and one carrying a light crop can make peaches a foot around.

It doesn't keep, though. A ripe one goes soft and spoils fast, so very few commercial growers plant it. If you want to taste one, you pretty much have to grow it or know someone who does.

What to do with them

This has always been a kitchen peach. The red flesh looks spectacular in a jar, so it built its reputation as a pickling and canning peach. It's usually put up in a simple sugar syrup, and the sugar balances the tartness. That same tartness makes it a good jam peach.

Fresh is how I like them best, right off the tree the day they're ripe.

How the tree grows

Here's one of my Indian Blood trees at two and a half years old.

Where I live in zone 7, this tree has been super easy to grow. It grows like any other peach, with a few habits worth knowing.

• It gets big if you let it. Burnt Ridge Nursery ↗ puts a standard tree at about 20 feet tall and 20 feet wide. Yearly pruning keeps it much shorter and easier to pick.
• It blooms late. Dave Wilson Nursery lists it as a late bloomer that sets heavy crops. A late bloom is a help anywhere spring frosts take peach blossoms.
• It ripens late. Most peaches are done by the time this one is ready. Dave Wilson's harvest window is August 10 to 21 in central California.
• It doesn't need a partner. Indian Blood is self-fruitful, so a single tree will set fruit.
• It needs a real winter. It wants about 800 hours below 45°F to bloom well, so it's a poor fit where winters are very mild.

Planting and care

I've found it an easy tree, and the care is the same as for any peach. These basics come from Clemson's home peach guide.

• Full sun. Give it sun for most or all of the day. Early morning sun matters most.
• Soil that drains. Peaches are extremely sensitive to wet feet, and roots die where water stands. A sandy loam is ideal, and a pH around 6.5 suits them.
• Don't plant it deep. The top root should sit no more than an inch or two under the soil.
• Prune it open. Peaches are trained to an open center, shaped like a vase, so light and air reach the middle of the tree.
• Thin the fruit. About four weeks after full bloom, pull off small peaches until the ones left are about 6 inches apart. It feels wasteful, but it's how you get big peaches and unbroken limbs, and this tree sets heavily enough to need it.
• Keep the grass back. A weed-free patch about 3 feet square around a young tree helps it get going.

It does get the usual peach problems. Burnt Ridge rates its disease resistance as average and says it isn't resistant to peach leaf curl. Brown rot, the fungus that turns ripe peaches to fuzzy mush, is the main peach disease in humid summers, so pick up fallen fruit and keep the tree open and airy.

Where to get an Indian Blood peach tree

I'll have Indian Blood peach saplings for sale this fall. If they're showing as sold out, leave your email on the product page and I'll let you know when they're ready.

Indian Blood peach FAQ

Sources

• Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, Indian Blood Cling Peach, adapted from The Fruits and Fruit Trees of Monticello by Peter J. Hatch
• David S. Shields, "Peaches, Part 2: Indian Blood", 2021
• Dave Wilson Nursery, Indian Blood peach
• Burnt Ridge Nursery, Indian Blood peach
• Albemarle CiderWorks, Indian Blood Cling
• Clemson Cooperative Extension, Peaches & Nectarines