Pomegranate flower bud

Description:

Small tree, or bushy shrub. The leaves are deciduous, usually glossy and dark green. The plant may have spines (thorns) along its branches. The fruit may be yellow to bright red in color, up to about 4 inches in diameter. The rind is smooth, but leathery, with a persistent, tubular calyx at the blossom end. The numerous seeds are surrounded by a pink to purplish or crimson, pulp which is juicy and subacid.

Habitat:

Wildlife habitat yard.

Notes:

The pomegranate tree is native from Iran to the Himalayas in northern India and has been cultivated since ancient times throughout the Mediterranean region of Asia, Africa and Europe. The fruit was used in many ways as it is today and was featured in Egyptian mythology and art, praised in the Old Testament of the Bible and in the Babylonian Talmud, and it was carried by desert caravans for the sake of its thirst-quenching juice. It traveled to central and southern India from Iran about the first century A.D. and was reported growing in Indonesia in 1416. It has been widely cultivated throughout India and drier parts of southeast Asia, Malaya, the East Indies and tropical Africa. The most important growing regions are Egypt, China, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq, India, Burma and Saudi Arabia. There are some commercial orchards in Israel on the coastal plain and in the Jordan Valley.