COMMON PERSIMMON – Clark Beavans, Trees SC Board Member & ISA Certified Arborist
Persimmon is a medium to large native shade tree but is inappropriate for use as a street tree due to the potential mess of its fruit. It is found primarily in moist floodplains, but also thrives in dry soils once established. The fruit is approximately golf ball sized, ripening in the fall season. Some trees drop their fruit, some hang onto it – like most species, there is substantial variation among a population. Some trees ripen as early as mid-September, some not until early November. Adequately ripened fruit is a favorite of wildlife and some humans, since it is ridiculously sweet. I personally love to collect, process and freeze persimmon pulp in order to make persimmon pudding or persimmon cookies (see recipe) for Thanksgiving, Christmas and any other occasion that calls for dessert!
The test for ripeness is basically softness: if a persimmon is soft, it is ripe whether it is on the tree or on the ground. The old wive’s tale about persimmons not ripening until after a freeze is a myth. When I collect persimmons, I favor trees that grow where someone cuts the grass underneath the tree. They generally hate the mess (it glops up the wheels of the mower) and are happy for me to pick up as many as I can. I take them home and process them with a Foley Food Mill (a saucepan with a perforated bottom and a propellor-shaped paddle on a cranked handle. Maybe your grandmother had one she used to make applesauce). I understand that one of those conical ricers works for this purpose also. Dump some persimmons into the mill and crank away over a large bowl, scraping the pulp off the bottom of the mill and dumping the seeds whenever you get tired of cranking. I freeze the pulp in plastic freezer bags or plastic containers in 1 – 2 cup batches. It keeps for a year or more in the freezer.
As a woodworker, I like persimmon wood because it is very hard and shock resistant: it was once the favored wood for producing golf club heads (drivers), bobbins and shuttles for weaving. I have seen it used in musical instruments for fretboards, pegheads and necks for guitars and mandolins. It often has very dark streaks or large areas of almost black heartwood – which makes sense, since it is the only North American relative of Ebony.
Persimmon often has spectacular dark red fall foliage. Summer foliage is a waxy dark green; persimmon bark is particularly blocky and you can identify it just from the bark and reddish leaf petioles. Flowers occur in May and are inconspicuous. Persimmon is dioecious (latin for two households), meaning that male and female flowers occur on different trees. By extension, female trees are the ones that bear fruit, and male persimmon trees (if there is a reliable male cultivar) could be appropriately utilized as street trees.
Appropriate use of common persimmon grown from seed stock in the landscape should focus on the fruit potential: it can be used in parks, orchards, large yards or institutional properties where the fruit would not cause any issues with parking, sidewalks or streets. Be aware that animals will be seasonally attracted to the ripening fruit, even in urban areas.
PERSIMMON BREAKFAST COOKIES (because they’re really good with coffee)
1 cup raisins ½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 cup nuts (we like walnuts) 1 teaspoon baking soda
2 cups all-purpose flour 1 cup persimmon pulp
½ teaspoon salt 1 stick butter
½ teaspoon cinnamon 1 cup sugar
½ teaspoon ground cloves 1 egg, beaten
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cream butter and sugar (a stand mixer make this easier), beat in egg, then persimmon pulp. Chop nuts and raisins and mix in a bowl with flour, salt, baking soda and spices. Stir dry ingredients into pulp mixture. It’s a really stiff dough. Drop by spoonfuls (a cookie dough scoop makes this much faster) onto a greased or lined baking sheet. Bake 15 minutes at 350 degrees, remove and cool on a rack. Store in an airtight container.
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