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Downtime home and Gardening-National News Who gives a fig where all the flowers have gone?
| Who gives a fig where all the flowers have gone? |
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| Monday, 10 December 2007 | |
 The fig (figue – Latin Ficus carrica) is not native but originates from east of Egypt. It has been cultivated for 5,000 years. I am somewhat thankful that I eat the cultivated fig. Some of its wild relatives have sexual processes which might turn one against them. But let me start at the beginning. Where are the flowers? The fruits, for lack of another term, are those strange soft swellings which are in fact swollen flower bases with the true flowers hidden inside them. Each of the thread-like structures you see within is a flower and, in those we eat, every one is a female. At the bottom of the ‘fruit’ is a tiny hole. All the fig trees we commonly see in France only have female flowers. As far as I know, no commercial fig tree in France has male flowers. The seeds never mature from small non-viable pips. Since you cannot grow these French varieties from seed, our neighbour, an ageing farmer, planted some fig stocks (boutures) for us. He took stems as thick as a finger and thrust them 40cm down in the ground. Oddly, it is not the case that the trees are either male or female. Trees may be female, but other trees have ‘fruits’ with a particular blend of male and female flowers, the latter having a rather weird function. These maleplus- female ‘fruits’ are called caprifigs. In ancient times these inferior figs were fed to goats (caprum, Latin for goat). In the countries where they occur caprifigs are largely full of pollen-bearing flowers but there are some female ones… and also wasps! Nothing like the large familiar species, these wasps are only 2mm long. They lay eggs in the female flowers of the caprifigs, which, remember, are surrounded by large numbers of pollenladen male flowers. These eggs become either male or female wasps. The males mate and die. Eventually, a new generation of female wasps, each well dusted with pollen and each with eggs ready to be laid, escapes through the hole (now old and fairly wide) at the bottom of every fig. They fly to either the true female-flowered figs or the caprifigs, squeezing in through the tight bottom hole of the young structure, often tearing off their wings as they do so. In their desire to lay eggs, they pollinate the flowers, which then produce viable seed. The female flowers of caprifigs are differently formed from those of edible figs and the pollination process does not work if the wasps try and lay eggs in the edible figs’ flowers. In California they cultivate a variety which has to be pollinated this way. Its unpollinated fruits shrivel and fall. The viable seeds impart a rich nutty flavour to the fig, but it also contains some dead female wasps. I am happy that this does not happen with the French varieties. Thankfully, the process is not as complex as in other exotic species of fig, where the life cycle of the fig-wasp is also assisted by the presence of bacteria and nematode worms! |
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