Pistachio tree in fruit

Pistacia vera - Common Pistachio

In 37 AD, Vitellius, then governor of Syria, introduced the pistachio tree to Rome. From this initial transplantation came one of the most beautiful gifts Rome bestowed upon Southern Europe.

A generous tree with oblong fruits flushed red by the sun, the pistachio offers that tender green, slightly oily, delicate, and fragrant kernel, known as the pistachio nut, which has delighted refined tables for nearly two millennia.

The common pistachio is a medium-sized tree, with a spreading habit, that sheds its leaves every autumn in our climates. Its branches are flexible, elastic, and its bark roughens with age.

Its leaves vary in their composition: simple, ternate, or composed of five oval, leathery, glabrous leaflets with perpendicular veins.

The flowers, clustered in yellowish panicles on the male tree and greenish on the female, appear in May.

The fruits, grouped in bunches, resemble small olives: yellowish, dotted with white when ripe, lightly tinged with red in the sun. The kernel they contain is very green, subtly fragrant, and nourishing. It is enjoyed plain, in ice cream, as a sugared almond, or coated in chocolate.

Duhamel and Poiteau remind us that in Paris, the pistachio tree thrives against a south-facing wall, and that simply shaking a flowering male branch over a female specimen is enough to obtain an abundant harvest.

This plate is taken from Pierre-Antoine Poiteau and Pierre Jean François Turpin's Traité des Arbres Fruitiers (Treatise on Fruit Trees), a botanical encyclopedia published between 1807 and 1835, and 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 from the golden age of botanical illustration.