Persimmon On the Brain

Last evening I was at some friends’ house helping look after their kids while they attended a funeral. I was walking around in the front yard with one of their sons, and I asked him if their persimmon tree was producing yet. He said yes, and we went over to take a look. Wow – a bumper crop, and many already on the ground. I picked one up, and with that mix of anticipation and dread that accompanies biting into a persimmon, I put a slit in the skin and sucked out enough for a taste, which was sweet, and then I ate the whole thing, skin and seed excepted. I don’t know if the dry weather has caused the persimmon tree to convert the fruit to sugar more than usual, but boy was that persimmon good!

Growing up in Columbia I was blessed to have a large and very productive persimmon tree on the edge of the woods just up from my house. I learned over time how and when to eat persimmons. There are few things as tasty as a sweet ripe persimmon, and few things as awful as a bitter one. A bad or unripe persimmon can create more facial contortions than you are aware you an make. A good persimmon can make you smile with joy.

Once I got used to the fact that a persimmon had to be almost mush to be good to eat, which was kind of gross, I made it a habit every fall to visit that tree many times. Once I even got my mom to make a persimmon cobbler.

I miss the taste. It is quite unique - nothing like it really. And there is a certain fun that goes with the risk of eating persimmon. Sometimes you think you’ve got a sweet one, and then you open up the fruit and suck out the mushy insides (staying away from the skin and seeds), expecting this wonderful tangy sweetness, and instead it feels like your mouth is swelling up from the bitterness, and no matter how much you spit, the taste stays there all day.

Persimmons are rather nondescript straight up smallish trees. Their most distinguishing feature is perhaps their bark – very alligator in nature with very dark small squarish blocks. The bark looks much like a dark dogwood, though the tree is taller, the trunk bigger, and the leaves longer and narrower, and opposite with no teeth. The bark can also be confused with the black gum, though that tree has leaves more like a dogwood and also grows much taller, with its own little blackish fruits. Its bark, though sometimes dark and blocked, is more irregular, and may well be more furrowed. I’m quite fond of the black gum tree. My friend with the persimmon is fortunate to have a black gum right next to it!

Persimmons can grow in various places, on a dry hillside, in an open field, or as an under story tree in a mature forest. They seem not to be terribly picky and take to bad soils fairly well.

Their fruits have long been eaten by man and beast. They were made into cakes of various sorts by our native forbears. Early colonists made persimmon cakes as well as puddings. And to the animals of the forest the persimmon is a favorite. If one is inclined to look, one can find persimmon seeds in the scat of most of our common woods mammals, as well as many birds. Possums love them. If you like having possums around, plant some persimmon trees! Dogs also tend to like persimmons, and seem to be able to discern which ones are good to eat.

Persimmon wood is exceptionally hard and heavy, and was used in great amounts in the hey day of the textile industry as shuttles for the looms. It was a very valuable wood and was thus logged heavily, about everywhere it could be found, and so truly old large persimmons are hard to find today.

Most persimmons you see these days are smallish trees, maybe 30-40 feet. They can get much taller – up to 120 or so feet. The 2005 Guilford County treasure tree program identified a persimmon in Jamestown at 37 feet high and 8 inches in diameter as our county’s biggest, but there have to be bigger ones than that around. Anyway, I’m in a persimmon eating mood, so if you know of any good fruit bearing trees, give me a shout.