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["Lon J. Rombough" <lonrom@hevanet.com>]

There are strains of American persimmons, mostly related to "Early Golden" that will produce occasional limbs of opposite-sex flowers.  At first it was thought that only females would produce limbs of male flowers, but there are males that will produce small seedless fruit, and some that will produce perfect flowers that give rise to normal, seeded fruit.   To add to the confusion, some of the females will set seedless fruit in certain conditions.  I have a lot of American persimmons here and several of the females will set all seedless fruit.  Meader, for example, will set seedless fruit here, but will also set seeded fruit when there is a male nearby.  Jim Claypool and I worked on the genetics of this phenomena for some time.
-Lon Rombough
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On Nov 30, 2008, at 2:28 PM, Alan Haigh wrote:
 
This didn't surprise me, because a giant Tulip tree on a neighbors property had died opening up the spot to significantly more light- at least the quality didn't but the fact that if bore at all without pollination was unexpected.