What is Princess Persimmon
Princess Persimmon is the common English name for Diospyros rhombifolia, a small deciduous relative of the edible persimmon, grown as bonsai for the small orange-red fruit it carries in autumn. In Japanese it is called rouyagaki (老爺柿), a name we keep alongside the English one because it is how the tree is known and traded in its home nurseries. The species name, rhombifolia, refers to the diamond, or rhomboid, shape of its leaves — a detail botanists still use to identify it.
Photo by Kazuhiro Tsugita, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons — Source
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Princess Persimmon belongs to the genus Diospyros, the same genus as the edible persimmon (Diospyros kaki), but it is cultivated for its appearance rather than for eating. In the wild it grows as a shrub or small tree up to about eight metres, native to hillsides and streambanks in eastern China. As bonsai, it is kept to a small fraction of that height, and the fruit — rounded, glossy, no more than a couple of centimetres across — is left disproportionately large against the miniaturised leaves and branches. Because each fruit on a tree ripens at its own pace, a single specimen can carry green, yellow, orange, and deep red fruit side by side in the same week. The tree flowers with small white blossoms in spring, holds green fruit through summer, and by autumn turns to orange and red fruit alongside yellow and orange foliage, so that the whole tree reads as one compact autumn scene.
Why Princess Persimmon takes years to fruit
Princess Persimmon is dioecious: individual trees are either male or female, and a female tree needs pollen carried from a male tree nearby to set fruit at all. From a tree's first flowering, it typically takes seven to ten years before it fruits reliably. A Princess Persimmon bonsai in full fruit, in other words, is never a young plant. It has already absorbed close to a decade of patient shaping before it produces the display you see in a photograph.
This is why the species sits among what Japanese bonsai calls mimono (実もの, literally "fruit-thing"), the broad category of fruiting bonsai grown to be watched for what they bear rather than for form alone. Mimono is one of the standing classifications used alongside shohaku (pine and other conifers), hamono (foliage trees), and hanamono (flowering trees) — see our companion piece on how bonsai are classified for more on this. Within mimono, Princess Persimmon is one of the most recognized species, prized precisely because its dioecious habit makes a fruiting specimen a proof of years already spent.
Photo by Cephas, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons — Source
The grower behind the tree: Nijuri Yoshio
The two trees behind this article come from Nijuri Yoshio (二十里芳男), a persimmon bonsai grower based in Kiryu, Gunma Prefecture, in the mountains north-west of Tokyo. Over thirty to forty years he has developed more than three hundred varieties of persimmon bonsai and is regarded within the field as a pioneer of the craft — one of a small number of growers anywhere who have made persimmon their life's specialization rather than a side line among many species.
Bonsai, as a craft, runs on two distinct roles that rarely appear in the same sentence. A grower spends years in the field building the raw material: selecting seedlings, judging which young trees are male and which are female long before either flowers, and shaping a trunk's basic structure while the tree is still, in bonsai terms, unfinished. An artist then reads that material years later and gives it its final form — the branch placement, the pot, the silhouette a viewer eventually sees. One finished bonsai passes through both hands, and the first of those hands is the one visitors to a finished tree almost never hear about. This article is, in part, an attempt to name that first hand.
Two trees, one pair
Two Princess Persimmon trees came to us from Nijuri's field. We are treating them as a matched pair — a traditional way of selecting two related bonsai so that they are viewed, and considered, together rather than as unrelated individuals.
One already carries a name: Urashima Taro, after the Japanese folk tale of the fisherman given a box he is warned never to open. The other has no name yet. It will be trained by an artist and will, at some point, be given a name alongside its next owner. In Japanese bonsai, a name — called mei (銘) — is not a catalog label or an inventory code. It is conferred on a tree in recognition of the story it has come to carry, usually after that story has had time to form. A tree without a name yet is simply a tree whose story has not started; that absence is not a gap to be filled quickly, but a placeholder for something that has to be earned.
How Azukari thinks about a tree like this
Both trees will now be shaped by an artist toward the fruiting form Princess Persimmon is capable of reaching. The tree itself stays in Japan, where the climate, the seasonal rhythm, and the artist's hand are all suited to it. Its owner, meanwhile, can be anywhere in the world. Each year's fruit is delivered to them as a record — photographs, notes, the small documentation of a season — and the owner is welcome to visit the tree in person whenever they choose. Because the tree itself does not travel to its owner, Azukari places its value on what does travel: the record, and the story built around it.
Japanese bonsai culture has continued for centuries by passing from hand to hand, sometimes across generations of the same family, sometimes across strangers linked only by the tree itself. Taking custody of a tree, in Azukari's model, means joining that lineage as its newest keeper — not owning a static object, but taking a turn in a chain of care that is older than any single owner.
You can read more about how bonsai are named in why bonsai carry names, and see where fruiting bonsai sit among the wider classification of bonsai in what is flower bonsai. For more on the artists who train material like this into its final form, see artist Kazuki Saeki.
Frequently asked questions
What does Princess Persimmon mean. It is the common English name for Diospyros rhombifolia, a small persimmon-family tree — called rouyagaki (老爺柿) in Japanese — grown as bonsai for its autumn fruit rather than for eating.
How long does it take for a Princess Persimmon bonsai to fruit. From its first flowering, a tree typically needs seven to ten years before it fruits reliably, since it is dioecious and depends on a nearby male tree for pollination.
Is Princess Persimmon fruit edible. It is closely related to the edible persimmon, but it is grown and valued as an ornamental bonsai for its look through the seasons, not as a food crop.
Closing
A single Princess Persimmon reaching its autumn fruit carries decades of a grower's work and a season of an artist's shaping, layered on top of each other and rarely visible at the same time. Taking on a tree like this means taking on that accumulated time as well, and choosing to carry it forward rather than let it end with you. It is a small, concrete way of keeping a long culture going.
See fruiting bonsai at Azukari
References
- Diospyros rhombifolia — Trees and Shrubs Online — botanical description, native range, and morphology
- Persimmon Bonsai (Diospyros, Kaki) care guide — Bonsai Empire — cultivation, watering, and fruiting notes
- Top 10: Bonsai Fruit Trees — Bonsai Empire — on fruiting bonsai as a category, including Diospyros
- The Joys of Viewing Bonsai in Autumn — Japan Foundation, Wochi Kochi — on mimono fruiting bonsai, persimmon, and dioecious pollination in Japanese bonsai tradition