Diospyros virginiana

The botanical name reads like a compliment: Diospyros joins the Greek dios, divine, to pyros, grain, so the genus translates roughly as "fruit of the gods," a lofty title for a tree that drops sweet, homely orange fruit onto the forest floor each autumn. The common name travels the other direction, plain and American, from the Powhatan word putchamin for a dried fruit, a reminder that Native peoples were drying persimmons into cakes long before the botanists arrived.

Diospyros virginiana is a medium, deciduous tree of the ebony family, native across the eastern United States, pyramidal in youth and rounding with age. The deeply blocky, gray-black bark, cracked into neat squares like alligator hide, is one of the surest ways to know the tree in winter. Persimmon is dioecious, carrying male and female flowers on separate trees, and only the females bear fruit; the small, greenish-yellow, bell-shaped blooms of late spring are quiet but draw bees in numbers. We offer seedling trees of undetermined sex.

The fruit is a lesson in patience. Bite one too soon and the tannins seize the whole mouth shut, which is exactly why generations of country children have dared each other to try. Left to ripen, often past the first frost, the same fruit turns to soft, honeyed pulp prized for puddings, breads, and preserves. Beyond the kitchen, persimmon has long served as a medicinal tree: the astringent inner bark was traditionally made into a wash for sore throats, and a vitamin-rich leaf tea was taken as a tonic. Learn about the healing properties of the American Persimmon here. The wood, meanwhile, is among the hardest in North America, dense enough that the heads of old golf clubs and the shuttles of textile looms were once turned from persimmon.

In the landscape, give Diospyros virginiana room as a specimen shade tree, a wildlife tree at a woodland edge, or an anchor in an edible or native planting. Persimmon tolerates a wide range of soil and moisture and asks little once established, and the autumn fruit feeds deer, foxes, opossums, and birds as generously as the gardener. Set the tree where the ripe fruit can drop without staining a patio, and plant a known female, or a group of seedlings, if a crop is the goal.

Photo courtesy of Alan Cressler.