I love these monsters who live at the edge of a garden in Old Town, San Diego… hiding in plain sight in the root system of pomegranate trees.  The first one, Punica, is my favorite…Her full name is Punica granatum.  

Pomegranate, Punica granatum,  is one of the oldest known cultivated fruits in history. It originated in Persia and is known and loved by people all around the mediterranean region.  One of my favorite writers is the Armenian American, William Saroyan; and one of my favorite short stories is his “The Pomegranate Trees.”  Saroyan works the young boy  Aram into several of his stories, and at the beginning of “The Pomegranate Trees” he lets Aram describe his uncle who is determined to grow pomegranate trees in California desert land at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains where even cactus doesn’t grow very well… and in spite of the fact Americans at the time didn’t particularly like pomegranate. 

Aram recalls, “My Uncle Melik was just about the worst farmer that ever lived.  He was too imaginative and poetic for his own good.  What he wanted was beauty.”