American Persimmon: A Healing Gift

Plant Highlight · Diospyros virginiana · Eastern North America

Captain John Smith warned that an unripe one would draw your mouth awry. He was right, and nearly everything else worth knowing about the American persimmon is just as particular.

9 min read · By Fiona von Grey · Aiken, South Carolina

I.A fruit that punishes impatience

Bite an underripe American persimmon once and you will not need the lesson again. The mouth turns to felt, the tongue seems to shrink, and the sensation lingers well past any reasonable welcome. The cause is soluble tannin, the same family of compounds that puckers a strong cup of tea, held in the fruit until the persimmon is truly ready. Then the tannins drop out of play, the flesh goes soft as pudding, and the flavor turns honeyed, with the apricot note that Smith caught four centuries ago.

The colonists at Jamestown learned this early, and Captain John Smith wrote it down in a sentence that has never been bettered.

The same old folk belief turns up in every Southern county: wait for frost. The frost is a coincidence of timing rather than a cause. Fruit of the American persimmon ripens from September into November, and the University of Missouri's extension specialists put the point plainly: freezing does not affect astringency, which fades with time, not temperature. A persimmon is ready when the fruit is soft to the touch, and sometimes already on the ground. That last detail matters. The best fruit is usually the fruit the tree has let go of.

II.Two names, two languages

The word persimmon came into English from Virginia Algonquian, the language of the Powhatan. Smith recorded the Powhatan name as putchamins; his contemporary William Strachey wrote pessemmins in 1612 and compared the fruit to an English medlar, "but of a deeper tawnie cullour." The final syllable, -min, means fruit or berry. What the first part meant is not known, whatever you may read elsewhere, and we would rather say so than invent a translation.

The botanical name comes from the opposite direction. Diospyros is Greek, built from Dios, of Zeus, and pyros, wheat or grain. Literally it reads "Zeus's wheat," and it is usually rendered as divine food or fruit of the gods. Linnaeus borrowed an old Greek plant name for the genus, and the link between that ancient name and these trees is a loose one. The phrase "fruit of the gods," in other words, is a European flourish laid over an American tree, not anything the Powhatan or the Cherokee called the persimmon.

The family is Ebenaceae, the ebony family, and the wood shows the relation. Most of a persimmon trunk is wide, pale sapwood, but at the very center lies a thin core of heartwood, often less than an inch across, dark brown to black and close to true ebony. The dense, close-grained wood earned a reputation of its own: the Forest Service lists turnery, shoe lasts, loom shuttles, and the heads of golf clubs, back when a wood was made of wood.

III.Loaves, beer, and pudding

The persimmon was a staple long before anyone wrote the name down. Smith noted that the Powhatan spread the fruit on hurdles over mats to dry, preserving them like prunes. When Hernando de Soto's expedition reached the Mississippi in the 1540s, the Portuguese chronicler of the march described loaves "like bricks," made of the pulp of a plum that modern editors identify as the persimmon.

Moerman's Native American Ethnobotany, the standard compilation of the published record, lists the fruit as food among the Cherokee, who made a persimmon pudding, and among the Comanche and the Seminole. The Rappahannock of Virginia made a beer: the fruit was rolled in cornmeal, brewed in water, drained, baked, and then mixed with hot water again. The habit carried straight into the Southern kitchen. Francis Porcher, cataloguing the useful plants of the Confederacy in 1863, recorded persimmon beer, a bread of persimmon mixed with flour, and spirits distilled from the fermented fruit, adding a friend's report that the brandy was particularly fine.

IV.What the medicine record actually says

Moerman's database holds seventeen recorded uses of Diospyros virginiana, and ten of them are Cherokee medicine, drawn from Hamel and Chiltoskey's Cherokee Plants and Their Uses (1975). The Cherokee took a persimmon syrup for bloody discharge from the bowels, for sore throat, and for thrush; used the plant as an astringent for sore throat and mouth; chewed the bark for heartburn; used a wash for piles; took a cold infusion of the bark for bile and the liver; and used compound preparations for toothache and, in a steam bath, for indigestion. Venereal disease is listed as well. Among the Rappahannock, Speck and his colleagues recorded an infusion of the inner bark as a wash for thrush, and bark from the north side of the tree taken for sore throat.

Read the list as a whole and a pattern appears. Nearly every use leans on the same quality that ruins an unripe fruit: astringency, the tightening, drying action of tannin, put to work on raw throats, sore mouths and loose bowels. The tradition is coherent because the chemistry is real.

V.What is in the fruit

A ripe native persimmon is a genuinely good food. The USDA's FoodData Central lists raw native persimmon at 66 milligrams of vitamin C per hundred grams.

The laboratory work on this particular species is thin. The most useful recent paper, by Olga Grygorieva and colleagues in 2018, measured antioxidant activity and total phenolic content in the fruit of six American persimmon genotypes grown in Ukraine. Antioxidant activity rose and fell with phenolic content, and the genotypes differed considerably from one another, which is a fair argument for growing good selections. That is a measurement of what is in the fruit, not a study of what eating the fruit does for a person. Most of the persimmon pharmacology you will find online concerns the Asian persimmon, Diospyros kaki, or tropical members of the genus, and should not be borrowed for our native tree.

VI.The tree in the garden

The American persimmon is native from southern Connecticut and Long Island to southern Florida, and west through eastern Kansas and Oklahoma into Texas. In good ground the tree reaches thirty to sixty feet. On dry old fields the same species may stay a shrubby fifteen or twenty feet. The range of hardiness runs from about zone 4 to zone 9.

Persimmon is a pioneer. The Forest Service describes the tree as often the first to colonize abandoned, worn-out cropland, and lists very dry, sterile, sandy woodland among the places the species grows wild. That makes the persimmon one of the few fruit trees that actively suits the deep sands around Aiken, and a natural choice for the sort of ground we wrote about in Gardening in Sand.

The tree is dioecious: most individuals carry either male or female flowers, and only females bear fruit. Plant at least two seedling trees, and ideally a small group, if you want a harvest. A few trees carry complete flowers and fruit on their own, and among named selections 'Meader' is described by the University of Wisconsin's uncommon fruit project as the one American persimmon reliably self-fertile. 'Yates' is another named selection grown for the table.

Plant the persimmon where dropped fruit can fall without apology. The Forest Service list of animals that eat the fruit reads like a census of the Southern woods: songbirds, raccoons, opossums, skunks, gray and fox squirrels, white-tailed deer, wild turkeys, and bobwhite. A female tree at the edge of a meadow in October is one of the busiest places on a property.

VII.The cousin across the Pacific

Most photographs of persimmons, including both on this page, show the Asian persimmon, Diospyros kaki, the large, glossy fruit of the supermarket and of East Asian gardens. In Japan that fruit is peeled and air-dried until shriveled, a traditional winter food called hoshigaki.

I saw them for myself in Kyoto in the autumn of 2024, on a two-week trip to learn something of Japan's botanical history. The persimmons were everywhere that season, hanging in long strings under the eaves like small lanterns, and strung by hand at a market stall where the air smelled of roasting chestnuts. Over a cup of matcha in a quiet tea house, I found myself thinking about our native tree back home.

It is hard not to see the parallel with the Powhatan drying their putchamins on hurdles four centuries ago. Two peoples, two species, one answer to the same problem: a fruit too astringent to eat early and too perishable to keep, turned into something that lasts the winter.

The native tree asks more patience than the import, and gives back something the import cannot: a fruit that belongs here, feeds half the woodland, and still tastes the way Smith said it did.