My mother had Alzheimer’s. She passed away in 2012.

I was a loved and indulged child and my mother and I were very close. I had the usual adolescent fallings out, and a rather less usual falling out when I was an adult, and I didn’t see her for many years. When we were reunited, I believe she was already losing some cognition due to dementia, but we felt like family again, and remained so until the end of her life, even though quite early in the illness she stopped being able to remember my name or call me her daughter. Those things didn’t matter. We were completely comfortable with each other and could laugh and enjoy things the same way we had earlier in our lives.

Pomegranates

When she still had enough cognitive ability to send me things in the mail, my mother would send me California pomegranates in the fall. She sometimes bought them and some she picked herself off a bush in her neighborhood. She knew they were one of my very favorite things.

When I was a kid, our next-door neighbors had a giant pomegranate bush. I got spoiled. There were more pomegranates than any five families could eat and I had carte blanche to forage as often as I liked. They were giant, got perfectly ripe and split open, and my best friend and I spent many happy hours eating pomegranate seeds (outdoors, because of the mess) until our hands and faces were magenta with the juice.

As an adult, no longer living in California, I have been very disappointed in the pomegranates that make it to the stores here. They are rarely ripe.

But back in about 2005, I accidentally grew a pomegranate bush. And some years later, I actually got a pomegranate off of it. Here is the story of my pomegranate bush. It starts with a hot pepper plant.

The Chiltepin

In the mid 1990s, in what I would call the early days of the Internet, I belonged to an email discussion group called Chile-Heads. It was for gardeners and cooks: anyone who enjoyed growing and cooking with hot peppers. From time to time people would offer seeds, and one year I got some from a guy in Corpus Christi, Texas. As I recall I traded some seeds from some extra tasty chile anchos I had grown. He called his peppers “petins” and I believe they were a variant of the chiltepin. The peppers are very small and round and are quite hot. I came to love those plants and would grow a couple every year. (They are perennials in parts of Texas, but the winters are too cold where I live.)

One year the bush had gotten so magnificent that I decided to try to overwinter it. I dug it up in mid-autumn, before a freeze could get it, and put it in the biggest pot I could manage to tote around. It lived in my guest room for the winter. I successfully did this several years in a row with the same plant, which started looking like a little tree. I would plant it in the garden again every summer.

I know I was doing this as far back as 1998, because when my sister came to visit that year I remember her mentioning how much she enjoyed staying in the guest room with the giant friendly pepper bush.

Then This Happened

Here’s how I described, in a letter to my mother, the next thing that happened.

10/7/07

I grew a pomegranate bush by accident. I had this enormous chile pepper plant called a petin that I would pot up in a huge pot and bring in the house every winter. Along with the garden soil would come some pillbugs. They live on rotting matter, and over the course of the winter, living in a potted plant, they would run out of stuff to eat. I would see them patrolling round and round the edge of the pot in the morning, seeming rather desperate. So I started to feed them. (I have always liked pillbugs, and I certainly don’t want to see any wildlife starve because I have interfered in their lives.) I would give them peelings and old stuff from the refrigerator. They were thrilled and would chomp it all up as soon as it got a little old.

Once I let one of the pomegranates you sent me go partly bad, so I put the fermented seeds in the pot for the pillbugs. They dutifully ate the pulp. I wonder if they got tipsy? But they left the actual seeds, and some little volunteer pomegranate plants appeared in the pot with the pepper plant. I took care of one of the plants and finally planted it out. The picture shows how big it was last year. It’s lots bigger now. They are not technically supposed to survive here because of the hard freezes in winter. But it has survived 2 or 3 winters so I guess it is going to make it OK.

I miss getting pomegranates from you. It’s hard to get ripe ones here. But my bush had several blossoms this year and I am hoping for some fruit next year.

So that dates my pomegranate bush back to 2004 or 2005. It is now 11 or 12 years old.

I should mention that I love pillbugs. They are also known as sowbugs, wood lice, armadillo bugs, and roly polys. Did you know that they are not insects, but crustaceans? I think they are fascinating. They look cool, don’t hurt anybody, and they clean up the trash. Here’s a photo of some in my garden. I’m not embedding because I imagine they are gross to some people. Not me!

I never knew whether to expect fruit from the bush. I didn’t even know if it would be fertile. If the seed had been from a grocery store fruit, it could have been some sort of hybrid. Gardeners hope for everything though, so it was always in the back of my mind. As I said in the letter to my mom, I got some blooms early on, but nothing came of them. This happened for 8 years or so, and I had given up hope. But in 2013, when I was idly looking at the bush with an eye to trimming it, I found two baby pomegranates on it! I went ahead and trimmed the bush and idiotically managed to trim off one of the branches with a pomegranate. Aaaaaagh!

But one survived, and come November, it was one of the best things I ever ate.

Inspiration and Failure

Naturally, being a gardener, I decided to read up on pomegranates again and maximize my chances of getting fruit the next year. I pruned when it said to. I fed what it said to, when it said to. And I got NO blooms on the plant in 2014. Zero, nada. I was very ticked off. I didn’t pamper it the next year and again, got no blooms. It even entered my mind to take out the bush. It’s not all that handsome. But I didn’t really entertain that thought seriously. How could I, with its connection to my mom? There’s even that mother/daughter thing in mythology with Persephone and the pomegranate seeds. So of course I kept the bush.

This Year

So now it’s 2016 and I have taken a few sideways glances at the bush throughout the spring. Nothing doing. I have thought frustrated, slightly wicked thoughts about the pomegranate bush. I’m still miffed that it tantalized me that one year.

Then, two days ago, I saw two blooms opening! I took a good look and counted about 10 more, but some could be male blooms only. The male blooms pollinate, but don’t fruit. So now I am checking every day and cross pollinating the hermaphroditic blooms (yes, that’s really the term) by hand as they open. (A friend of mine used to call that having sex with her plants.)

I have big plans for my 5 – 10 pomegranates this year. I shall baby those fruit and build them little slings and do whatever it takes to keep them safe. If I harvest some fruit, I’ll do as my sister suggests and share some seeds with the pillbug colony. It’s only fair.

But even if I get no fruit, the bush will stay, of course. My mom sent me the seeds. And the pillbugs helped them grow.

Copyright Eileen Anderson 2016