The genus name means food of the gods, which is either generous or a warning depending on when you bite. An American persimmon before frost is famously, memorably astringent; the same fruit two weeks later, gone soft and translucent, is honey and apricot and one of the better things in a Southern autumn.

Diospyros virginiana is a tough, adaptable native that grows in poor ground and old fields, feeds nearly everything with legs, and carries bark broken into small blocks like alligator hide. The trees are mostly dioecious, so fruit follows where a male grows nearby. Diospyros texana, the Texas persimmon, is the other proposition entirely: small, slow, and grown for smooth gray bark that peels to pink and cream, with black fruit that stains whatever they touch.