Pomegranate
Punica granatum
Family · Lythraceae · Irritating
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The shrub with fire-red flowers shaped like a fleshy trumpet, surviving decades on the walls of abandoned farms and still bearing pomegranates. It came with the Arabs and stayed all over the Peninsula.
Fields and pasture · Scrubland · Walls and rocks · Roadsides and waste ground
Also known aspomegranate tree
How to tell it
A shrub or small tree with stiff branches, often thorn-tipped, with opposite, narrow, glossy leaves of a green that reddens as it shoots. Flowers of five to seven crumpled scarlet petals inside a thick fleshy jar-shaped calyx, which later becomes the pomegranate's crown.
What it is confused with
Strawberry tree
Arbutus unedo
They are confused at a distance by round red fruit in the scrub. The strawberry tree fruit is warty outside, soft, with evergreen serrated leaves; the pomegranate is smooth, hard, crowned with teeth at the top, and its tree has narrow glossy leaves. Both fruits are eaten.
What it is for
The pulp around the seeds is eaten and it is a market fruit. The fruit rind and root have traditional medicinal use, but the root bark contains alkaloids that in high dose are cardiotoxic and have caused serious poisonings: it is historical use, not to be repeated at home.
Traditionally used as food. This is not permission to eat it.
With documented traditional uses. Not a therapeutic indication and not a dose.
Where it occurs
Each square is an area with recorded observations of this plant. The lighter background is the set of areas where any of the entries has been observed, and serves as a reference. Note what this is not: it is not where the plant lives, it is where people record it, so trails and towns always look fuller than the mountains. Data from GBIF.
Sources
Community
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