The Dry Garden: Ask Persephone
Posted on | September 30, 2011 | No Comments
Plant a pomegranate and the hole you dig drives straight through time — Persephone deep, founding fathers deep. Pomegranates are in Greek and Persian mythology, the Bible, the Koran, on the seal of the British Royal College of Physicians. Scholarly gardening articles cite pomegranates as having figured in gardens in the colonial Carolinas. Spanish settlers brought them to California. Search the botanical name Punica granatum in technical journals and you find the chemists at L’Oreal are onto them: Pomegranates are named in a new patent for shampoo. Health publications carry studies on the anti-oxidant properties. Martha Stewarts everywhere recommend dried pomegranates for Christmas wreaths.
But gardeners can turn up a lot of trivia without learning one key fact: how to tell when they are ripe. (Hint: the one above isn’t). Click here to keep reading about growing pomegranates to crimson readiness in this week’s Dry Garden column in the LA Times.
Comments
Leave a Reply
North American Native Plant Societies
After the lawn
Garden blogs
