Common Persimmon Diospyros virginiana
Common Persimmon is a perennial tree native to the lower 48 states. It grows to 55 ft and blooms May in full sun, with orange fruit.
More about this plant
Diospyros virginiana is a persimmon species commonly called the American persimmon, common persimmon, eastern persimmon, simmon, possumwood, possum apples, or sugar plum. It ranges from southern Connecticut to Florida, and west to Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Iowa. The tree grows in the wild but has been cultivated for its fruit and wood since prehistoric times by Native Americans. Both the tree and the fruit are referred to as persimmons, with the latter appearing in desserts and cuisine in the U.S. South and Midwest. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun
- Soil & moisture
- Medium moisture
- Soil pH
- 4.7–7.5
- Fertility need
- Medium
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 5+
- Drought tolerance
- Low
- Shade tolerance
- High
- Wet-soil tolerance
- Moderate waterlogging
- Height
- 55 ft
- Mature width
- ≈ 17 ft wide wild/forest-grown — open-grown specimens spread wider
- Spacing
- 8–12 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- Moderate
- Growth rate
- Slow
- Growth form
- Single crown
- Lifespan
- Perennial · long-lived
- Foliage
- Deciduous/evergreen broadleaf · medium texture
- Active growth
- Spring & summer
- Fruit
- Orange persists into winter
- Propagate by
- Seed, Cuttings, Bare root, Container
- Seed starting
- Needs cold stratification a cold-moist spell before it germinates
- Seeds ripen
- Summer – Winter seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Deer browsing
- Medium moderately palatable
- Resprouts if cut
- Yes regrows after top-kill
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~46 caterpillar species
Diospyros supports ~46 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a strong genus.
Recorded feeding on Diospyros in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees 7 bee visitors
7 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Common Persimmon :
+ 1 more bees → ↑ show fewer
Wildlife & visitors 7 birds · 1 mammal · 3 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Common Persimmon — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 7 birds and 1 mammal species (fruit, seed, browse) — the most-recorded:
+ 1 more species → ↑ show fewer
3 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Across 856 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Common Persimmon, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
Related plants
More Diospyros →
How we know this (4) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
A small, hand-checked crosswalk: each native edible is matched to its food in the USDA nutrient database (e.g. American persimmon → "Persimmons, native, raw", black walnut → "walnuts, black"), and we read that food’s per-100 g values. We only include matches that are unambiguous; a few genus-level commodities (e.g. mulberries) are marked as the closest food match. We do NOT auto-match by name (too error-prone) — so coverage is deliberately small.
Honest limits: Composition of the edible part as a food (often the cultivated/commodity form), matched by common food name — a guide, not a measurement of the exact wild plant. Never an identification or edibility guarantee.
Sources for this entry (41) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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