Any guesses for variety?

My neighbor’s tree produces the tiniest, extremely delicious persimmons. Her English isn’t great, so she isn’t able to tell me what tree this is, but I suspect it’s a wild variety that was used as rootstock for a different tree that didn’t make it.

However, this neighbor loves planting trees from seed, and has peach, plum, avocado, and apricot that have grown from seed in her garden. She also has Fuyu and Hachiya persimmons, which I suspect were planted as saplings purchased from a nursery. And then she also has this mystery tree.

I eat as many of the tiny fruit as she offers me. They’re like dates in sweetness and texture, and are good when deep orange all the way through black and wrinkled.

Any guesses of variety would be appreciated. I tried looking up American wild persimmons, and the most likely one (Lotus or Date Plum) look rounder than these, which you can see are oblong and pointed like a Hachiya got zapped by a shrink-ray.

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UsefulAd8513

No scale shown but looks very similar to the date plum in Cambridge Botanic gardens.

small_spider_liker [OP]

The second photo is me holding them in my hand. They’re about the size of a large olive. About 2cm, or .75in long, give or take.

CyberGeneticist

Were they tasty?

small_spider_liker [OP]

Heck yeah! Sweet and date-like. I have a branch again this year, and discovered I have to wait for them to fully darken to brown or they have a strong unripe persimmon astringency. Like your tongue got coated in bitter dryer lint.

I still don’t quite know what they are. Most of the fruits don’t have seeds.

CyberGeneticist

Thanks for the reply! I am glad they are tasty. I am no expert, but in my searches about persimmons I have stumbled across a related species to persimmons (diospyros kaki for Japanese ones or diospyros virginiana for American ones) that is Diospyros lotus. It is one people suspect was described as far back as in the Homer's Odyssey itself (fascinating reading)!

Anyway, if you look Diospyros lotus up, you might find they look quite similar to what you have and I believe they are also edible, with relatively small/tiny fruit. So that would check out. Let me know what you think after looking them up.