Goodby to the Pomegranates

Update: It turns out some of the assumptions on which I based this months-old post were, as assumptions are wont to do, false. Thanks to Ed Laivo whose comments below shed much-welcome light on pomegranate naming conventions and the like.

I didn’t enjoy sawing down the two pomegranate tree/bushes and then digging up their roots, because they were lovely in the spring. However, thanks to bad marketing on the part of the wholesale nursery trade and one of their local retail customers, these turned out to be trees with poor fruits, so out they went. Life is too short to grow insipid pomegranates.

As best I can discern, California’s Dave Wilson Nursery, one of the biggest wholesalers of pomegranate trees, decided a few years ago that the real names of pomegranate varieties weren’t splashy enough for marketing purposes. So they changed all the names. We had read that a variety originally named Parfianka had won some major taste-tests, and had other desirable qualities we wanted in a fruit tree. We had also read that the Wilson nursery had renamed this tree “Garnet Sash” (splashy, huh?). So three years ago or so, we bought two “Garnet Sash” trees from a local retail nursery that has not since become one of our favorites. The labels on the trees show they came from Dave Wilson.

Here is a representative description of Parfianka, the likes of which you will find on various retail nursery web sites:

Large size Red fruit is sweet with a hint of acidity. Arils are red with very small edible seeds. Vigorous upright plant sets a heavy crop dependably. Maintain at any height with summer pruning. Always receives the highest praise for overall flavor. Great for juice or fresh eating.

Here is my description of the fruit we got from our trees over the past two years:

Small to medium fruit is green with a hint of pink when ripe. Arils are white with large, bitter seeds. Vigorous upright plants set a lot of flowers, a few of which become fruit. Overall flavor is insipid, with bitter overtones. Lousy for fresh eating and not very juicy.

Thus, it appears to me that whatever the retailers are selling as “Garnet Sash,” it is not Parfianka. It isn’t even a red variety, although when you create a marketing name containing the word “garnet,” the public (at least the percentage of the public familiar with the word “garnet”) is going to be expecting a red variety.

Bottom line: The wholesale nursery industry is capable of using marketing to shoot itself in the foot instead of increasing sales through the promotion of great plants.

Next time I go pomegranate shopping (if I go again) I may have to get a USDA license and import them from overseas in order to assured of getting what I paid for. Sheesh.