Persimmons

Just another name for stewardship

My mom loves flowers. In every house we’ve ever lived in, there’s always been a garden and my mom to tend to it, hanging baskets near the front porch and potted plants on the window sills, tulips in the spring and roses in the summer, pansies and petunias, hyacinths and hydrangeas, daffodils, dahlias, and daylilies—a sprinkle of petals that dot the earth like confetti almost year-round. I’ve tried taking care of my own potted plants (orchids, succulents, cacti), but I’m inevitably bound to wind up with naked, browning stems and a whole lot of soggy plant to sweep into the trash. I hear that the secret is talking to them. That, and remembering to give them water. It’s not just about the petals and the leaves, it’s about the roots too. Apparently. 

My mom doesn’t just take care of flowers, though. A garden is much more. There are those cute little boxwood shrubs with their tiny green leaves and round edges, the dwarf evergreens with their bristly and stumpy branches, plus a handful of other bushes and saplings whose names I don’t know. They just look good all together in the backyard, and I had to haul around a watering can in the summer to every last one whenever my mom was out of town. 

This one needs a half a can, and this one a quarter, she’d tell me. That one needs the watering can with the spout, but that other one doesn’t. And, yes, the sprinklers do go off in the morning, but you still need to water them in the afternoon because it’s Utah and it gets hot and—don’t whine, it’s only for a week, just do this for me—petunia petals can get weighed down with too much water, so you have to aim for the roots and not the petals. Otherwise, they look sad and droopy, like pieces of rotten spinach. 

For the record, I still whined while stumbling around the backyard with a too-heavy watering can. And, just so you know, the petunia petals do look like droopy rotten pieces of spinach when you get water on the petals. But in my defense, I was a middle-schooler with noodle-like arms. Can’t be helped. 

It’s been a long time, but I remember a very specific plant my mom wanted for her garden, a persimmon tree. Like the name suggests, the tree grows persimmons, a fall and winter fruit that makes for a sweet treat in the colder months. I always preferred mine softer rather than crunchy, with the kind of juiciness that has a way of taking up the whole mouth and sticking to your fingers after. People say they taste like honey, but I’ve always thought it was a bit milder and warmer than that, still sweet but not sickly. 

While there are persimmon trees native to the U.S., my mom wanted one from Korea—a taste of something familiar, something like home in her new home. She actually bought a tree online and had it shipped to her. The only problem was the shipping process itself. By the time it arrived in Utah, the tree’s roots had decayed, rotted. My mom picked a place to plant it in the backyard anyway. I think the hope was that it would recover under careful supervision and attentiveness. 

It died soon after. Long before it bore fruit or even bloomed yellow-white flowers. 

My mom went without her persimmons. 

We used to live near a plant nursery. It was down the street, a three-to-five-minute walk away. With a nursery that close and a garden of her own, my mom obviously knew the owner; she knew she could go to him for plants and soil, or with questions she had. (Contrarily, and unrelatedly, I knew them for their really cool Halloween decorations, which I always got excited about even as I entered high school and became “too old” for trick-or-treating). The owner was also a member of our local ward while my dad was serving in the bishopric. 

I’m not sure how he heard about what had happened to the persimmon tree. Maybe my mom told him, or maybe my dad, but all I know is that a little while later there was a healthy persimmon tree in our backyard. He had seen to its careful transportation himself, leaving it in a smaller plastic pot to look after its sensitive roots. 

I don’t actually remember whether or not the tree ever produced fruit that was good enough to eat. I just remember my mom watering it, and the occasional yellow-white buds that would gather on its slim branches. 

A few years after that, the owner of the nursery passed away. His family asked my dad to conduct his funeral. I don’t know if they knew about the persimmon tree. 

We ended up moving not long after—not far, but far enough for it to be a change. 

The persimmon tree hadn’t been doing as well. It didn’t really bloom anymore. Mostly, it was just a tangle of skeletal barren branches, sitting upright in a little plastic pot buried in the ground. But my mom and dad dug it out anyway, placing it in the back of my dad’s truck to transport it all the way to the new house. Both the house and our yard were still under construction, so for now, the tree would solitarily wait until the day it could be officially planted, finally moved from its little, lonely corner. 

I was a sophomore in college by that point, often confined to my apartment room due to pandemic lockdowns, slogging through Zoom classes and the oft-quoted slogan for 2020: “We can’t hear you, you’re muted.” So whatever I heard about the house, the landscaping, and that persimmon tree came secondhand over infrequent and brief phone calls with my mom whenever I asked her for help on my Korean homework. She told me that she and my dad came every day to either water or see that tree in its now little-less-lonely corner. 

The tree disappeared one day. It was a sizable thing, even if it was small, so it couldn’t have been misplaced or lost. And yet, it was just gone. 

My mom later found out that the landscapers had tossed it, assuming it was one of the dead trees they needed to clear away to make room for the rest of the landscaping. My mom hasn’t gotten a persimmon tree since. I’m a senior now. 

She reminded me of this story over Christmas break on a slow, snowy afternoon during lunch while I was picking at gyros and french fries. It’s hard to know what to say to something like that. I don’t know where to get another persimmon tree, or if it would even be a good idea to try to order one online again. 

I just keep thinking about roots and the church branch I grew up in. About how roots branch out and loop and curl over one another, back in on themselves, stretching and reaching through the earth. Sometimes, they touch—a mycorrhizal network of different, but interwoven strands. 

Provo has a few different Asian markets. I’ve been haunting their aisles in February, looking for Korean persimmons. People say they taste sweet, but I think it’s milder, warmer, softer.