Pomegranate

Punica granatum

Family · Lythraceae · Irritating

EdibleTraditional use

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.

Where it grows

Fields and pasture · Scrubland · Walls and rocks · Roadsides and waste ground

Also known as

pomegranate tree

In flower

In fruit

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

Harmless confusion

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.

Open sheet →

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.

Sources

Flora-On