Common Pistachio - Botanical poster 50x70cm

Pistacia vera - Pistachio Tree

In 37 AD, Vitellius, then governor of Syria, introduced the pistachio tree to Rome. This first transplantation gave birth to one of Rome's most beautiful gifts to Southern Europe.

A generous tree with oblong fruits, sun-kissed with red, the pistachio tree offers this tender green, slightly oily, delicate and fragrant kernel, called a pistachio, which has delighted refined tables for nearly two thousand years.

The common pistachio tree is a medium-sized tree with an open habit, which 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 individual and greenish on the female, appear in May.

The fruits, grouped in clusters, resemble small olives: yellowish, dotted with white at maturity, slightly tinged with red in the sun. The kernel they contain is very green, subtly fragrant, and nourishing. It is enjoyed plain, in ice cream, in sugared dragees or coated in chocolate.

Duhamel and Poiteau recall that in Paris, the pistachio tree thrives against a well-exposed south-facing wall, and that it is enough to shake a flowering male branch over a female subject to obtain an abundant harvest.

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 naturalistic 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 with 12-color giclée printing, the benchmark for art workshops for rendering fine tones, subtle gradients, and the most delicate botanical details.
• 200 gsm paper weight, soft matte finish, 0.26 mm thickness: a result similar to the original engraving, clear, non-reflective, designed for hanging.
• Printed on FSC certified paper, printed individually upon order.
• Shipped in a rigid protective tube.