Miniature Pomegranate

What’s still green: Arborvitae, juniper and other evergreens, Apache plume, some rose stems, cholla, prickly pear, yuccas, Japanese honeysuckle, grape hyacinth, sweet peas, vinca, beardtongues, coral bells, sea pink, pink and yellow evening primroses, snapdragons, chrysanthemums, purple aster, cheat grass.

What’s grey, blue-grey or grey-green: Piñon, pinks, snow-in-summer, yellow alyssum, saltbush, winterfat.

What’s red: Saint John’s wort.

What’s yellow: Weeping willow branches.

What’s blooming inside: Bougainvillea and aptenia; rochea and Christmas cactus leaves tinged with red.

Animal sightings: Rabbit and smaller animal tracks in snow Friday morning.

Weather: Rain early Thursday, snow later in day with even deeper mud between; ice everywhere Friday morning; 10:28 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: A woman I work with knows I like plants, and so occasionally shows up with some improbably bright colored one for the office. It’s often some type of campanula or orchid, but for my birthday two years ago it was a miniature pomegranate.

The 6" high tree continued putting out tiny, trumpet-shaped claret flowers until Christmas. When I brought it home for the week we were closed, it went into a a sulk. The brown branches started dropping their narrow oval leaves when it went back to the office, and there were never any new ones.

This past Thanksgiving I brought it home again, took what turned out to be three plants from a 3" pot, stuck them in existing pots on the enclosed porch and left the deciduous trees to adapt. They dropped whatever leaves remained.

Last weekend I discovered new leaves at the bases of the spreading branches. Sun angles had changed, morning temperatures had stabilized around 20, and, outside, some chrysanthemums, snapdragons and the yellow alyssum had put out new growth.

While it was still blooming in Santa Fe, a neighbor woman noticed it. When I mentioned what it was, she said she knew. Each time Olga came by, she looked at the plant, sometimes saying she wished she had one. I would have given her mine, knowing she could have nursed it back to health, except Gini, the woman who gave it to me, was keeping an eye on the ripening single fruit.

I never knew where Olga was from, but I think some part of México, maybe Zacatecas like so many in the neighborhood. At the time I thought she was attracted to the flowers like we were. Now I think it had the same nostalgic value for her that hollyhocks have for so many of us, a reminder of something from her childhood.

Pomegranates are an evolutionary dead end thought to be native to the Iranian plateau and its surrounding mountains. The only other Punica species is found on Socotra Island, off the horn of Africa in the Indian Ocean. Phoenician traders disbursed the plant. It moved to Rome from their Carthaginian colony in modern Lybia, and was taken to Spain by the Moors where some ten varieties were growing when Ibn al-Awam was writing in the late 1100's.

William Dunmire says that after Hernán Cortés subdued the Aztecs in 1521, the Spanish divided the Cuernavaca valley in modern Morales state into large estates to produce its food. By 1530, the orchards there included pomegranates.

Then, in 1531, Dunmire says, the Spanish settled Puebla in the Tehuacán Valley on the route to their main port at Veracruz. Administrators created smaller land allotments for people who failed to grow sugar in the Caribbean and were moving to the mainland. Toribio Motolinía, who wrote between 1536 and 154, said that there "fruit trees of every kind prosper extremely well, especially pomegranates."

Granadas may have been brought to México for food or medicine or the tannins in their rinds that were used to cure leather. The hard wood was used to construct one of the early buildings on the Pánuco river nearer Veracruz where Cortés had defeated the local inhabitants in 1523.

Whatever utilitarian purposes they served, pomegranates were quickly used for decoration. In 1652, Thomas Gage mentioned the trees were growing in the gardens of the elite in Mexico City.

When Maturin Ballou was visiting Zacatecas, the mining center that was home to Cortés son-in-law, Juan de Oñate, and many of the early settlers in the Española valley, he noticed that while the poor lived in adobe hovels in the late 1880's, he would occasionally see "a small garden inclosed with high adobe wall, belonging to some rich mine owner, in which the tall pomegranate, full of scarlet bloom, or a stately pepper tree, dominates a score of others of semi-tropical growth."

Some thirty years later botanist Joseph Kirkwood visited Hacienda de Cedros on a desert plateau north of the city. He remembered that when he came near a hamlet built around a spring at the base of some surrounding slope, he would find "ash and pepper trees, pecans, avocados, figs, pomegranates, apples and grapes, rows of magueys and hedges of tuna-bearing nopáls."

In Zacatecas estado, like elsewhere the Spanish settled, the red fruited tree moved beyond the courtyards of the aristocracy and put down roots wherever conditions were favorable. Nasif Nahle Sabag still curses the "ignorant mayor" who cut down the pomegranate that grew in the plaza of his childhood village in Zacatecas along with eucalyptuses and an apricot. Olga could recognize a tiny plant from more than six feet.

Today, pomegranates grow wild in Azerbaijan and are still hybridizing and mutating. Gregory Levin saw dwarfs, creepers and densely branched bushes around Kopet Dag in the 1930's, and found the external characteristics of full-sized trees to be quite variable. He theorized the changes there, and in other places where Punica granatum had developed local variants, were caused by human selection and high background radiation.

A dwarf plant was sent from the Caribbean to Philip Miller at the Chelsea Physic Garden, who described it in 1754. He believed it was cultivated for "the Beauty of its Flowers," which appeared most of the year on shrubs that rarely grew more than three feet. The fruit on his tree was the size of a walnut and "not very pleasant to the Taste."

Miniature pomegranates, called Nana by botanists, remain highly variable. Brent and Susie Walstron say they only offer cloned varieties to bonsai growers because "many plants sold are actually seedlings of dwarf plants that are quite variable, some of them even nearly full size."

The plant that attracted Gini and Olga is probably one of those Nana bastards distributed by the Nurserymen’s Exchange of California. But predictable habits mean nada compared to Gini’s fascination with miniaturization and Olga’s childhood memories.

Notes:
Ballou, Maturin Murray. Aztec Land, 1890.

Dunmire, William W. Gardens of New Spain, 2004, quotes Toribio Motolinía and Thomas Gage.

Kirkwood, J. E. "Desert Scenes in Zacatecas," Popular Science, November 1909.

Levin, Gregory Moiseyevich. Pomegranate Roads: A Soviet Botanist's Exile from Eden, 2006,
translated by Margaret Hopstein; quotes Ibn al-Awam

Miller, Philip. The Gardeners Dictionary, volume 3, 1754.

Sabag, Nasif Nahle. "Nieves, Zacatecas," 2004, on Biology Cabinet Organization website.

Walston, Brent and Susie. "Pomegranate" on Evergreen Gardenworks website.

Photograph: Miniature pomegranate with chaste tree, 30 January 2009.