Sweet Pomegranate

Punica granatum – Sweet Pomegranate

The sweet pomegranate owes its name to its juicy pomegranates, whose translucent seeds, similar to red currants, contain a sweet and abundant acidic juice.

But it is also one of the most beautiful garden ornaments: its scarlet flowers bloom continuously from June to September, illuminating the branches with their fleeting petals and golden stamens.

A disturbing fact noted by Poiteau himself: the stems of double-flowered pomegranates twist as they age, as can still be observed on centenarian specimens in the orangery of Versailles.

This shrub produces several flexible, elastic stems from its base, covered with ash-grey bark. Its oblong, shiny, slightly petiolate leaves turn red in autumn.

The small lateral branches end in a dry thorn. The brightly colored red flowers are born three or four together at the top of medium-strength branches. The fruit, the pomegranate, is a large rounded apple, with thick, leathery skin, yellow flecked with russet, washed with red on the sun-facing side.

The interior is divided into unequal locules lined with compressed, angular, translucent seeds, filled with a delicious juice. Each seed contains an elongated white seed, tasteless but reputed to be astringent. In Paris, under the climate of the time, pomegranates only ripened on the eve of frosts.

This plate is extracted from the Traité des Arbres Fruitiers by Pierre-Antoine Poiteau and Pierre Jean François Turpin, a botanical encyclopedia published between 1807 and 1835, a major reference in 19th-century naturalist illustration.

It combines the rigor of scientific drawing with a rare artistic sensibility, characteristic of the great plates of the golden age of illustrated botany.

As an anecdote, this plate was used by Salvador Dali for his lithograph series 'Flordali, the Fruits' in 1969.