Is an american persimmon a good tree to plant in Indiana?
American Persimmon can work here, with caveats. Genuinely an Indiana tree — the Mitchell Persimmon Festival in Lawrence County has run since 1947 on wild fruit from trees growing in and around town — and it is most abundant in the southern half of the state. Around Indianapolis it turns up on fencerows, old field edges and lots carved out of pasture far more often than as a nursery planting.
What you'd be signing up to clean up
The fruit is the whole complaint — one to one-and-a-half inch orange globes that stay bitterly astringent until they go soft, then hit the ground as sticky pulp from September through November, staining concrete and drawing wasps, yellowjackets, raccoons and possums. Leaves are small and easy by comparison; twigs and small branch litter are a secondary nuisance.
Where to keep it away from
Seedling persimmon drives a deep taproot, which is why it shrugs off drought and hard clay and why it is notoriously difficult to transplant at any size. The bigger practical issue is lateral root suckering — mature trees push shoots up through lawn and fence lines well away from the trunk, and mowing them off only keeps them coming.
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