A ripe pomegranate fruit is a natural object of great beauty - as are its seeds, with their succulent juicy aril, when they are scattered like jewels over a salad. There are few fruits that have a richer store of mythology associated with them. In antiquity they were associated with fertility, due to their numerous seeds and the ease with which these germinate. It’s easy to grow pomegranate as an attractive conservatory plant by sowing a few seeds, then training the resulting plants on a single stem and shortening the shoots in the crown of the plant, to produce a compact head of foliage bearing attractive, waxy scarlet flowers – but usually no fruits in Britain.
Prof. Dr. Otto Wilhelm Thomé Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz, 1885, Gera, Germany
Image Source: Wikipedia Commons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Illustration_Punica_granatum2.jpg
Pomegranate originates from northern Iran but by Roman times its popularity as a thirst-quenching fruit meant that it had spread around the Mediterranean. The Romans imported what they considered to be the finest fruits from Carthage, which they called Punica and which has provided the plant with its generic name. Pomegranates were widely grown in Roman villas and there are frescoes in the House of the Fruit Orchard in Pompeii dating from AD79 which depict the tree in fruit. According to Roman mythology, pomegranates are indirectly responsible for winter. In one version of the story Proserpina, daughter of Jupiter and Ceres (the goddess of the harvest), was abducted by Pluto and dragged into the underworld. In anger, Ceres froze the harvest and paced the earth, leaving desert wherever she travelled. Jupiter’s messenger Mercury eventually persuaded Pluto to let Proserpina go, but not before she had eaten six pomegranate seeds, the food of the dead, condemning her to live six months of the year with Pluto, during which time crops above withered in the winter, but when she returned to earth for the remaining six months she brought spring with her.
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Prosperpine (1874). Tate Gallery London
Image source: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Proserpine-(utdrag).jpg
By the 4th. century AD the fruit had acquired Christian symbolism, with the many seeds within the fruit representing the followers of the church. There is a wonderful mosaic from a Roman villa at Hinton St. Mary in Dorset depicting Christ flanked by two pomegranates, which by then had become symbols of Christian devotion. Catherine of Aragon, the first wife of Henry VIII adopted the pomegranate, with its crown-like shape, as her badge and the fruit features in historical and literary associations in Spain.
There is only one other species of pomegranate, P. protopunica, an endemic on the island of Socotra, and Punica is the only genus in the family Punicaceae.
Thanks for the very interesting and informative post. The pomegranates in my garden are usually eaten by the squirrels, though I manage to get one or two.
ReplyDeletemagnifique post..et en plus ,dante gabriele rossetti.. ! fallait trouver..
ReplyDeleteThanks Phil. Plant and animal life is rich in fascinating facts and mythology. I enjoyed reading that. It's a long time since I had a pomegranate; they were a real treat when we were children. And now, after reading this, I wish I had a conservatory!
ReplyDeleteI am afraid I must unleash my pedant.
ReplyDeletePunic refers to the people or things of Carthage, it was not a name of the city. The Romans called the city Carthago or Carthago Magna (Great Carthage) to distinguish it from Carthago Nova (New Carthage), now in Spain and called Cartagena. Similar to the difference between Roma and Latin.
Punic referred to their heritage as a Phoenician colony. One Latin name of the pomegranate was the gender neutral Punicum malum, the Carthaginian apple. It was also called Malum granatum, the seedy apple. It may well have given its name to the garnet, for the colour of the stone.
The latest evidence shows that the pomegranate is well within the Lythraceae rather than in a family of its own as the Punicaceae. I can't find the original article, which I thought was in Am J Bot but here is another http://www.amjbot.org/cgi/content/short/ajb.1000143v1 Of course, some botanists may disagree but IPNI and Tropicos have it as Lythraceae.
Why do you quote the Roman copy of the earlier Greek myth of Persephone and Hades? Demeter's abandonment of her duties was in sorrow and distraction as well as anger. Another botanical association comes from this episode. The tears of Demeter turned to opium, a gift to humanity for assuaging their unbearable sorrows. Of course, the poppy was found in her sacred cornfields. This version has three pomegranate seeds and three months of winter:
http://www.arthistory.sbc.edu/imageswomen/papers/paolicchidemeter/demeter.html
The pomegranate was also associated with Yahweh.
The fruit splits open when it is ripe, not quite like poor Rossetti's which looks even less fresh and ripe than those available in supermarkets now. This split is often seen in representations of the pomegranate and may be part of the reason for its use as a symbol of fertility.
What a wonderful discussion going on here! Obviously, the colonizers who came to the Philippines (maybe Magellan's time)also brought some of that seeds here, as we i thought it is endemic here. I've just tasted it when we were kids, sour for me, so i did not bother to taste again till now. With this post i am re-thinking. If there are no other species can i assume the taste here is also the same taste there? I wonder why the importance to this fruit, apart from the crown-like structure. But guavas have them too!
ReplyDeleteI found this story and it's so charmingly done (for eduweb) that I had to post the link. It's called The Pomegranate Seeds and tells of how Winter began.
ReplyDeletehttp://atschool.eduweb.co.uk/carolrb/greek/pomegranate.html
I'm off up to Durham today to get me some pomegranates. :O)
Andrea, there are quite a few varieties of pomegranate varying from sweet to some that are as acidic as lemons. Some of the sweet ones have no flavour.
ReplyDeleteYou must avoid eating the dry parts of the fruit. Even the papery bits are very bitter. Picking each seed out individually is one way round this, you can get very fast with practice. Using an orange squeezer to juice the pomegranate can avoid getting the bitterness in the juice if you do it fast enough.
Thanks lotusleaf, it must be wonderful to go out into the garden and pick pomegranates - our supermarket fruit is never as good as the freshly-picked equivalent.
ReplyDeleteMerci Elfi....
ReplyDeleteHi Lesley, I think there's a pomegranate growing in the glasshouses in Durham University Botanic Garden, in the centre of the glasshouse where the pond and butterflies are housed...
ReplyDeleteHello Pat, no need to be afraid to unleash your pedant on this blog - your comments are always informative.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting that you should mention the etymological link with garnets; I can recall collecting garnets from mica schist rocks near Kindrogan in Perthshire, when I was a student, which were very similar in colour to the pomegranate specimens in my photograph.
Why do I quote the Roman version of the myth? Because it was conveniently linked to the information about the Pompeii frescoes, the mosaic and Rosetti's Proserpine. I've read many versions of the myth, with accounts of the number of seeds eaten that range from three to six - perhaps adapted to local variations in the length of winter?
I did wonder whether molecular systematics had reassigned Punica to another family, as seems to have been the case in a number of monogeneric families, and should have checked. Thanks for the prompt. I think the papers you were looking for might have been Huang YL, Shi SH (2002) Phylogenetics of Lythraceae sensu lato: A preliminary analysis based on chloroplast rbcL gene, psaA-ycf3 spacer, and nuclear rDNA internal transcribed spacer (ITS) sequences INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PLANT SCIENCES 163, 215-225 and Graham SA, Hall J, Sytsma K, Shi SH (2005) Phylogenetic analysis of the Lythraceae based on four gene regions and morphology..........INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PLANT SCIENCES, 166, 995-1017.
There is a very fine watercolour by Ann Schweizer of pomegranates in The Art of Plant Evolution by W. John Kress and Shirley Sherwood, which shows ripe fruits splitting in a rather similar manner to the one depicted by Rosetti, although the fruits in the watercolour do look rather anaemic compared with the intensely coloured pair that I photographed. I suppose there must be a lot of variation within the species - and commercial cultivars from selected clones. Kind regards, Phil
Hi Andrea, I didn't realise that you grew them in the Philippines. Interesting things happen to domesticated plants when small sub-samples of the species are moved around the world and develop locally distinct populations .... it would be very interesting to compare your fruits with pomegranates grown in other geographical locations...
ReplyDeleteHi Lesley, lovely version of the story.
ReplyDeleteBrides used to throw a pomegranate to split it open and spill some seeds to devine how many children they would have. Pomegranate juice is called grenadine, although how this name fits I don't know, but due to the fragmentation of the fruit it then lends this name to grenades. But this doesn't out pendant Pat. ;-)
ReplyDeleteHi Phytophactor, I've never tasted grenadine cocktails but now you've given me an excuse.... thanks!
ReplyDelete