Sweet Pomegranate - Botanical Poster 50x70cm

Punica granatum – Sweet Pomegranate

The sweet pomegranate owes its name to its juicy fruits, whose translucent kernels, resembling red currants, contain a sweet, 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 troubling fact noted by Poiteau himself: the stems of double-flowered pomegranates twist with age, as can still be observed on the century-old specimens in the Versailles orangery.

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

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

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

This plate is taken 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.

• Each poster is printed using 12-color giclée printing, the benchmark for art workshops for the rendering of fine tones, subtle gradients, and the most delicate botanical details.
• 200 gsm paper weight, soft matte finish, 0.26 mm thickness: a rendering close to the original engraving, sharp, glare-free, designed for hanging.
• Printed on FSC certified paper, printed individually to order.
• Shipped in a rigid protective tube.