Early Golden
A named persimmon cultivar.
The record
- Parentage
- not recorded
- Origin
- introduced in the late 1800s
- Rights
- freely propagated — Introduced in the late nineteenth century, long predating the US Plant Patent Act of 1930. No IP claim found in the sources consulted.
- Species
- Diospyros virginiana
Description
The ancestor. A pomological analysis of American persimmon ancestries places ‘Early Golden’ behind a large share of the named cultivars in circulation, including as the probable self-pollinated parent of selections that were recorded as open-pollinated at the time.
It was the foundation of both twentieth-century breeding efforts — James Claypool’s and Jerry Lehman’s — which means the American persimmon cultivar list is far narrower genetically than its length suggests. Reading a catalogue of twenty American persimmons, a grower may be reading twenty descendants of one tree.
That is worth knowing before treating cultivar diversity as genetic diversity. They are not the same measurement, and for a species being asked to carry disease resistance or climate tolerance, the second one is what counts.