the.com/fig
a flower that turned itself inside out and called it fruit
means A soft, sweet, pear-shaped fruit full of tiny seeds, borne by the fig tree, often eaten fresh or dried.
from From Old French 'figue,' descended from Latin 'ficus,' the name of both the tree and its fruit. The Latin word's deeper roots are murky — possibly borrowed from a lost Mediterranean tongue, as fig cultivation in the region predates the Romans. The same Latin source gives us 'ficus' in botany and lurks behind 'sycophant,' literally a 'fig-shower,' whose own backstory is famously tangled.
- inside-out bloom
- each fig is hundreds of flowers facing inward
- wasp deal
- pollinated by wasps that die inside them
- enzyme cleanup
- ficin dissolves trapped wasps into protein
- ancient crop
- among the first plants humans ever farmed
- newton lie
- fig newtons contain no Newton, just figs
fig tree of jericho — ancient sycamore fig in palestine, claimed to be over 2,000 years old, mentioned in biblical texts
smyrna fig — cultivar from izmir, turkey, requires pollination by fig wasp and produces the commercially dominant california figs
black mission fig — dark-skinned variety grown in california's san joaquin valley since the 1700s, represents 90% of us fig production