172 TREES 



brown seeds. A taste for this tropical pond apple is as 

 easily acquired as for the pineapple, which has become uni- 

 versally popular. Every garden in the Orange Belt should 

 have a cherimoya tree for ornament and for its fruit. 



THE PERSIIVIMONS 



The persimmon tree of the Southern woods belongs to 

 the ebony family, which contains some important fruit and 

 lumber trees, chiejfly confined to the genus diospyros, 

 which has two representatives among the trees of North 

 America. Doubtless a climate of longer summers would 

 enable our persimmon trees to produce wood as hard as 

 the ebony of commerce, whose black heart- wood and thick 

 belt of soft yellow sap-wood are the products of five different 

 tropical species of the genus — two from India, one from 

 Africa, one from Malaysia and one from Mauritius. The 

 beautiful, variegated wood called coromandel is produced 

 by a species of ebony that grows in Ceylon. 



Fossil remains of persimmon trees are found in the 

 miocene rocks of Greenland and Alaska, and in the later 

 cretaceous beds uncovered in Nebraska. These prove 

 that diospyros once had a much wider range than now, ex- 

 tending through temperate to arctic regions, whereas now 

 our two persimmons and the Chinese and Japanese species, 

 are the only representatives outside the tropics. 



The Persimmon 



Diospysos Virginiana, Linn. 



The persimmon will never be forgotten by the North- 

 erner who chances to visit his Virginia cousins in the early 



