I’ve recently learned there are members here who have bought Garnet Sash Pomegranate which a few sellers are falsely advertising as equivalent to Parfianka. Here’s one:
… and it is not clear to me whether Parfianka and Parfyanka are seperate varieties, though I imagine they are (and are sold by some suppliers as such).
They are separate accessions. One of them historically was more robust and so those of us who visit Wolfskill regularly requested that accession. When Ed brought it into the Dave Wilson catalog he chose the “i” spelling.
In my climate I’d give it 3 out of 5 stars. Also note that apart from quality, there are different flavors of pomegranates. For traditional pomegranate flavor I’d grow J. Chater’s “Eversweet” in my climate. However, I prefer M. Rosovyi here because of it’s slight subacid (peachy?) flavor.
I posted in the other thread, but apparently Garnet Sash is actually “Elf”. Frustrating, because I hear Gissarskii Rozovyi is excellent, and it has been on my wishlist for quite some time.
These are from Richard Ashton’s pomegranate book. Elf has many different descriptions. So much misinformation out there hard to know what is going on. The person I got my Garnet Sash cuttings from described his fruit more in line with the last two descriptions of Elf below.
• “Parfianka” – Sold as Garnet Sash by a large west coast
nursery. This great red fruit with soft seeds has a complex
sweet-tart taste. Excellent. Plant is vigorous with heavy
production.
• “Elf” – Red skinned fruit with dark- red sweet-tart arils on a
medium/small size plant hence the name “Elf”. Very good for
cooking
DPUN 045 Elf – Also DPUN 88 – Dwarf. Fruit greenish-yellow with
orange blush, shape blocky, size small to medium. Arils large, translucent
pink. Juice light pink, slightly tart and watery. Named by John Lovell.
Description by Dr. John Lovell, Fruit Gardener, Vol. 20, No. 1, 1st
Elf – Dwarf with yellowish-green fruit with orange blush. Arils large,
translucent pink. Juice light pink. Heavy bearing. Another dwarf that is a
showy plant but bares large fruit. Slow growing.
I checked with Harvey Correia, and he too said Garnet Sash is Elf. He has Gissarskii Rosovyi that he collected from Wolfskill, and says that it’s excellent.
Two things I have learned
1 Garnet Sash is not Parfianka
2 Dave Wilson should not have given them their own new names which has created much of this confusion
As a customer of Dave Wilson at the time I can assure you that Parfianka NEVER was given a new name.
Also note that Ed Laivo (a colleague of mine at the time) has apologized profusely for creating the confusion – he completely underestimated the knowledge of CRFG members.
I dunno if that was intended as some sort of slight towards me, I was just trying to get to the bottom of things, and I think I did so without needing to check the accession numbers?