Hey these look a lot like buds to me! Lotus persimmons taste good? I know they are said to be small. I have hundreds of buds.
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The fruits of Diospyros lotus propagated for root stock are generally very high in tannin and will have you puckering up in no time! However, there are ancient cultivars in the middle east that are sweet and low in tannins. They are thought to be native to the Alazani river valley in Georgia and known to be grown in Georgia, Albania, Azerbaijan, and northern Turkey. There is also reasonable speculation that these are the lotus fruits in the story of Ulysses Odyssey. They are not present at Wolfskill (I’ve tasted them all). I’ve been trying to get plants legally imported from Turkey for a dozen years and no success yet.
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Showy tree!
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Raintree uses lotus as their understock for their asian persimmon.
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Greetings from Austria! Your tree looks great. Two of my D. Lotus trees would have flowered this year for the first time, but were killed back almost to ground due to late freeze (around 24 °F, from ~6 feet height to ~2 feet). It was too early to tell if the flowers would have been male or female. The trees have just started to form new leaf buds. My Asian persimmons were heavily killed back too - still too early to say if all of them have survived.
Do you have a better close-up picture of your flower buds? In your first picture it seems to me that the flowers have appeared in groups of 2 or 3 - which might mean your tree is a male one. I wasn’t able to find a website in English with flower pictures. But please take a look at this German website http://www.baumkunde.de/Diospyros_lotus/ that has two pictures of flower buds: “männliche Blüten” means male flowers, “weibliche Blüten” female flowers.
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Mkon_at,
How has the weather been in Austria? Been an unusual winter / spring here. Maybe these pictures will help. The blooms are very small . I planted 5 trees but only 1 of the 5 are blooming. The trees came from Sandusky nursery years ago. We frequently get tip die back on these also. Like figs I’m not really supposed to grow them in this zone.
Well, I haven’t observed any real D. Lotus female flower yet (only on pictures). However I’m afraid I think those on your pictures are male flowers - which would mean no fruits. Maybe someone else could chime in with a second opinion. However with 4 more trees to go there is still hope. I am not sure if a female D. Lotus would produce fruits without a male anyway: there are contradicting opinions on websites.
I have a small D. Lotus growing in a pot which has [male] flowers in groups of three. That potted tree flowered previous year too. The plants in the garden that died back seemed to have differering flower buds. For the younger tree I tended more to think it were male flowers in groups. While the older tree that got its first flowers too seemed to have single [female] flowers. Could it be that male trees start to flower earlier than female trees? My D. Kaki with male / female and perfect flowers produced in the first two years only male flowers.
We don’t have any kangaroos here since my location is Austria in Europe (therefore my English tends to be funny). The late winter / early spring was really unusual this year as we had high daytime temperatures much earlier as in previous years. Many farmers lost their entire apple, grape and other crop. I think somebody had posted an article about that freeze in Austria, Steiermark (Styria) here on growingfruit.
All my D. Lotus and D. Kaki had leaved out nicely - about 2-3 inch before the surprisingly hard spring freeze struck. The spring freeze did at lot more damage than a regular winter in my region. Currently only my hybrid Nikita’s Gift and another two plants also sold as “Nikita’s Gift” to me (with differently looking leaves!) are in relatively good shape with many replacement leave buds / young branches, even the one in the worst location in my garden. For my other non-hybrid D. Kaki varieties it is too early to tell … I hope I know in 2 weeks if all of them have survived. On some plants I was not able to locate any green buds yet. My small Paw Paw Prima1216 (European variety) also lost all new growth and flower buds but at least it started growing again without any dieback on last year’s growth. I hope I can locate more Paw Paw varieties here in Europe - especially Halvin sounds interesting.
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Thank you! Misread your original post and corrected my mistake on your location. The reason I planted so many lotus was assuming they needed to be male and females like American persimmons need. If I get a bunch of males we have kaki - American hybrids I think would be graft-able to lotus persimmon.
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Diospyros lotus is the preferred rootstock for D. kaki.
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Diospyros lotus is well known in Europe, its fruit has no interest is very small.
Diospyros lotus is used as rootstock that has great affinity with many varieties and holds very well the limestone ground, I particularly like Diospyros virginiana more as rootstocks
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The lotus persimmons did not flower this year. Last year they flowered this time of year. These are my American persimmons which have not fruited yet.
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How have those lotus done in 2018 and 2019? Did you graft on to them?
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I have one that flowered for the first time this year and turned out to be female, it is holding onto a bunch of blueberry sized fruits, doesn’t seem to need a male but I’m not sure if they will have time to ripen. I grafted half over to Tam Kam, will probably get rid of the rest of the lotus next year.
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Ive not grafted them yet but plan to use early golden or an asian x american hybrid. @39thparallel and i have them on the radar for next year to topwork.
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For those who need grafting instructions Grafting-Persimmons.pdf (580.0 KB) from https://www.deerassociation.com/sex-among-persimmons/
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I’m reviving this thread as there was a recent discussion of lotus persimmons.
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Thanks, I had not found this thread.
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