Catherine,
The green persimmon fruits will not ripen adequately if they're aborted early.
Young persimmons often drop most, if not all, of their fruits - sometime for several years - when they first start producing. Fertilization - especially with a high-nitrogen fertilizer seems to exacerbate this problem.

Some will produce seedless fruit without benefit of pollenation, but sometimes, if they're unpollenated, they'll abort those fruits before they are fully developed. The only way you'll know if there's a male in the vicinity is if the fruit have seeds.

Thanks for that info Lucky.
I just opened a few of the ones I brought in, and they have seeds. Its so hard to believe there's a male anywhere around for miles.........but I'm glad they have seeds.
Is it possible that this is some kind of American variety that can fertilize itself?
Makes sense that its aborting alot of its fruit in its first year. Lots of vegetables seem to do that too, at the first of the season.
Thanks again!

catherinet:

Take a look at the term polygamodioecious - and wonder at the versatility of plants.

vv is right.
There are some 'families' of American persimmon - particularly those in the Early Golden/Garretson lines - that are noted for throwing out 'male' branches - or even branches with 'perfect'(both male and female parts present) flowers on an otherwise 'female' tree - and some 'male' members of those family lines - like Szukis and F-100 produce predominantly staminate flowers, but some that run the gamut to 'perfect' and pistillate, and will produce fruit, in addition to pollenizing flowers on female trees.
Until recently, I did not have any 'male' persimmons grafted in my orchard - but there are plenty of wild persimmons around, so most of my fruits are seeded. But!...virtually all of my grafted Americans are of the 90-chromosome race, and *supposedly*, the natives in my area should be of the 60-chromosome race... so, the vagaries of persimmon sex become even more sullied than I can begin to explain.

There's a 'male' persimmon tree in the neighborhood, just across the driveway from a very productive female - but every once in a while, I'll notice a single, solitary fruit, high up in the canopy of the 'male'.

Well, now I'm really confused! (But that doesn't take much!).
I guess I'll just wait a couple more years and see what's happening.
So if a mainly female tree has some male flowers......are they mostly on one branch? And I could have fruit.....but if that branch were to fall off, I wouldn't have fruit any more?

I've looked and looked for flowers on these trees, and I've never found any. When they are "of age"......might the blossoms start closer to the top of the tree?

If I did have just a few male blossoms, would that mean that possibly, I would only have some fruit that had seeds?

I sort of feel like I'm back in high school health class. :)

I imagine if I have a "polygamodioecious" tree, the fruit production might be inconsistent from year to year?
Thanks!

At the risk of muddying the waters even more, following is an explanation written by the late Lon Rombough, that I'd saved - probably from around 1999-2000:

"Several years ago I went through Jim Claypool's notes and used the results to work out a theory of the inheritance of sex in American persimmons, to take into account the appearance of limbs of opposite sex flowers on a tree (limbs of male flowers on female trees, etc.).
For convenience, we decided to call ordinary persimmons as having XX for female and XO for male, O being
the plant equivalent of a Y chromosome. Though in truth I think there isn't much difference between the X and O, only a very few genes.
Opposite sex types had at least one of those chromosomes with a mutant gene on it that coded for flowers of the opposite sex on the tree, and those
were X' and O'.
A tree that had X'X was a female that would have some limbs of male flowers. X'O was a male that would, in some cases, have small seedless fruit on it. X'X' was a female that had a strong tendency to produce male limbs, while X'O' was a male that would produce perfect flowers and normally seeded fruit.
Now, with the X'O', it was possible to self-pollinate it and get trees that were O'O' and these, theoretically, should be essentially perfect flowered types. However, we don't have enough test crosses to verify that.
What it boils down to, is that it should be possible to cross the males that produce perfect flowers and get some seedlings that produce ONLY perfect flowers, or at least enough to make them truly useful, not just something that takes up space once pollination is done.
I hope this makes sense to all as it takes a LOT of writing to re-explain the whole thing. I am hopeful of doing a book on American persimmons - kind of a new version of "Persimmons for Everyone" and will include it in that when/if I can find a publisher." - Lon Rombough

I'm not sure whether Lon ever finished his persimmon book before his untimely passing in 2012, at age 62.

Thanks lucky.

Sounds like just about anything can happen!
Sad that Mr. Rombough died so young.