Persimmon

Two species and their hybrids sit in this file, and the practical differences between them are larger than the shared name suggests.

Astringency is the first question. Kaki cultivars are sorted into four groups on two axes: whether astringency is lost on the tree regardless of pollination, and whether the flesh darkens when seeds are present. That gives pollination-constant non-astringent (PCNA), pollination-variant non-astringent (PVNA), pollination-constant astringent (PCA) and pollination-variant astringent (PVA). Nearly all cultivars fall in the PCA and PCNA groups. In plain terms: a PCNA cultivar such as ‘Fuyu’ can be eaten firm, like an apple. A PCA cultivar such as ‘Hachiya’ is inedible until it is fully soft, and someone who bites one early will never try another. Selling the wrong one to a first-time eater is how this fruit loses customers.

Pollination is the second. American persimmon is functionally dioecious: most named cultivars are female and need a male tree somewhere nearby to set seeded fruit. A few are parthenocarpic and will set seedless fruit without one — ‘Meader’ is the cultivar usually named for that, and it is the reason it turns up in every list for people planting a single tree.

Beyond that, the American species carries two chromosome races, a 60-chromosome and a 90-chromosome type, which do not cross freely. The distinction rarely appears on a nursery tag and it matters if you intend to breed or to plant a male as a pollinizer, so where the sources record a cultivar’s race, the record below states it.

The American cultivar list is unusually genealogical for a fruit nobody breeds commercially. A pomological analysis of assimilated ancestries found ‘Early Golden’, introduced in the late nineteenth century, standing behind a large share of the named cultivars, with several selections reported as open-pollinated that are more likely to be its self-pollinations. Most of the twentieth-century work was private — James Claypool’s programme and, after it, Jerry Lehman’s in Indiana — which is why the numbered selections (H-118 and its kin) turn up in nursery catalogues without a release publication behind them.

The hybrids are a third thing again. D. virginiana × D. kaki crosses out of the Nikitsky Botanical Garden in Yalta were made to carry kaki fruit quality on American hardiness, and they are the reason the crop can be attempted north of where kaki alone survives.