Do you recognize this mystery plant?

John Nelson
For Bluffton Today/Jasper County Sun Times
This mystery plant is a shrub or small tree, native to the Mediterranean and southern Asia.

We botanists are very picky when it comes to adjectives because we like to make descriptions as accurate as possible.

For instance, here’s something that is round, basically, with some funny stuff at one end, so some people might want to say it is spherical. But we phytological nitpickers like to point out that it isn’t perfectly round and may contain various imperfections or indentations, unlike a true sphere. So the term spheroidal comes into play. Thank you, dear reader, for continuing to read.

It is a fruit, of course, about the size of a softball and covered with a smooth, leathery, orange-red skin. Botanists refer to this fruit as a kind of berry and it is tightly filled with seeds, maybe a couple hundred or so. Each seed will be packed into a number of white, pithy chambers and at maturity each seed will be enclosed in a ruby-red, juice-filled outer layer.

The juice is deliciously sweet and sour, filled with vitamins. Ripe seeds are often eaten as a delicacy. It’s a bit of a chore to chew off the delicious, outer juicy layer, but some connoisseurs just chew up the whole thing, seed and all. Otherwise, you can find its juice bottled in just about all grocery stores. And of course, there is sweet, syrupy grenadine, which is derived from the juice.

Our mystery plant is a shrub or small tree, native to the Mediterranean and southern Asia. Because of its fruits, it has been known since antiquity and is prominently featured in plenty of ancient stories and mythology. The ancient Greeks loved this plant and grew it as an ornamental for its bright red-orange petals. Of course, they were more interested in its fruits, as were the Romans.

This is a plant that is easy to grow in warmer parts of the United States. The shrubs feature shiny, dark green leaves, sharp-pointed at the tips. When the plants are firmly established in the garden, they ripen their marvelous fruits in the fall. This species especially appreciates long, hot summers, and it likes it dry. This one has been growing for a number of years in my backyard.

The ripe fruits typically hang downward and at the flower end will be topped with the remnants of a fleshy calyx, and this resembles a crown. These fruits are quite decorative, and for those who are reluctant to eat the seeds, the fruits look great piled into a bowl, sometimes featured at Thanksgiving.

The French word for one of these fruits is “grenade,” and sure enough this botanical structure has provided inspiration for the word that gives us the explosive weapon. A big, ripe, fruit, if dropped on the floor, will sometimes burst into pieces, scattering its seeds. The seeds are the shrapnel inside.

The fruit itself resembles a swollen, red apple, filled with its ripe seeds. Its French common name means “seedy apple.”


Answer: Pomegranate, Punica granatum