🌸 The fruit that hides its flowers

Pick any fruit tree you know and the order of events is the same: it blossoms, the blossom is pollinated, the blossom swells into fruit. Everyone has seen an apple tree in flower. Now try to remember a fig tree in flower. You cannot, and that is not your memory failing. Texas A&M AgriLife Extension, writing a growers’ guide for a state where figs stand in back gardens, describes the common fig this way: the “fruit” is “formed without fertilization (parthenocarpic)” and is “actually fleshy stem tissue with no seeds,” and “The gelatin-like interior is actually unfertilized flower structures.” So a fig is not a fruit wrapped around flowers. It is the flowers, folded inward and sealed, inside a case that is really swollen stem. Cut one open and every thread and speck you are looking at is a flower part.

Basis: Texas A&M AgriLife Extension, EHT-019, “Figs” (Texas Fruit and Nut Production), by Jim Kamas, Monte Nesbitt and Larry Stein: “The ‘fruit’ of common figs are formed without fertilization (parthenocarpic) and are actually fleshy stem tissue with no seeds. The gelatin-like interior is actually unfertilized flower structures.”

That works because a common fig does not need pollen at all. But one important fig does — and this is where it gets strange. University of California Cooperative Extension, costing out a real Calimyrna fig orchard in the San Joaquin Valley, has a line item for the problem: “Caprification refers to the pollination of Smyna type figs, such as the calimyrna variety, by the wasp specie (Blastophaga psenes L.).” What the wasp does is written down in the plainest possible way: “This wasp performs the function that bees and other pollinators normally provide, by crawling across the male flower (also known as a caprifig), covering itself with pollen, then entering the eye of the female fig (known as the Calimyrna fig) and dusting the flowers with pollen.” Read the mechanism slowly. The wasp does not land on a flower. It goes in. The only door is a small opening at the end of the fig called the eye, and everything a bee would do out in the open happens in the dark, inside the fruit.

Basis: University of California Cooperative Extension, “Sample Costs to Establish a Fig Orchard and Produce Figs in the San Joaquin Valley, Calimyrna Variety — 2005” (Louise Ferguson, Karen M. Klonsky, Pete Livingston), Pollination section. “Smyna” and “wasp specie” are the study’s own spellings, quoted unchanged.

Because it is a service, it has a price. The same study records that “Typically the fig wasp is put out in the orchard during June,” that “Fig wasps are usually supplied to the orchard during these periods in order to ensure proper pollination and good fruit set,” and that “In this study, services for caprification are provided by another fig grower or company that supplies the wasps at an annual cost of $125 per acre.” Somewhere there is an invoice for insects. In the study’s own calendar the job happens “once a year in late May or early June” and is “supplemented by additional wasps contracted from an outside pollinator service.” Those dollars are the assumptions of a 2005 cost study, not a price list for today — but the arrangement is the point, not the number.

Basis: Same UC Cooperative Extension cost study, Pollination sections (establishment and production): “Caprification or pollination of the figs occurs once a year in late May or early June and is supplemented by additional wasps contracted from an outside pollinator service.”; “Typically the fig wasp is put out in the orchard during June.”; “In this study, services for caprification are provided by another fig grower or company that supplies the wasps at an annual cost of $125 per acre.” The $125 is a 2005 study assumption.

So there are two completely different ways to be a fig grower in America, and they have almost nothing to do with each other. In the back gardens of the South you grow a common fig, which sets fruit on its own and asks nobody for anything. The Texas guide is blunt about what works there: “Although commercial fig cultivation in Texas has been largely unsuccessful, small dooryard plantings can meet a family’s needs and provide some limited income from local sales.” In a Calimyrna orchard in California’s central valley you hire wasps, by the acre, from somebody who keeps them. Both are figs. Neither can do the other’s job. And the plant reached the country the long way round: figs are “believed to be native to western Asia,” the same guide says, and “They were brought to California from Spain in the mid 1700s and then spread to the warmer growing regions east of the Rocky Mountains.” Figs arrived on the Pacific side and travelled east.

Basis: Texas A&M AgriLife Extension, EHT-019, “Figs”: “Prized since ancient times, figs are believed to be native to western Asia. They were brought to California from Spain in the mid 1700s and then spread to the warmer growing regions east of the Rocky Mountains.”; “Although commercial fig cultivation in Texas has been largely unsuccessful, small dooryard plantings can meet a family’s needs and provide some limited income from local sales.”

What decides where a fig tree can stand at all is mostly winter. “Figs are generally limited to areas where temperatures do not drop below 5°F,” the Texas guide says, “although the stem tissues can be injured at much higher temperatures.” One sentence, and most of the map is explained: a fig is a warm-winter plant that has been carried far past where it would have gone by itself.

Basis: Texas A&M AgriLife Extension, EHT-019, “Figs,” Climate section: “Figs are generally limited to areas where temperatures do not drop below 5°F, although the stem tissues can be injured at much higher temperatures.”