Strawberries, Fragaria, Beloved Fruits. 2. Uses and Folklore

Strawberries are popular fruits, eaten world-wide. This is despite the fact that fresh strawberries do not improve after harvest and cannot be stored for very long. So popular are they that we have bred them to produce fruit throughout the growing season, not just briefly in June or July, and ship them from warmer climates or big greenhouses for year-round fresh strawberries, and we freeze them or preserve them as jams and jellies to them always available.

fruit salad with strawberries

Plant Story--Sambucus, Elder or Elderberry, Widespread Tasty Berry

Species in the genus Sambucus are called elder. That somehow doesn't sound right to my eastern North American ear, so I always say elderberries. That name I prefer is clearly weird--the tree doesn't always have berries, or the berries are just the fruit of the elder--but I'm not alone in this speech pattern, you can see it in a lot of U.S. writing. Historically and properly, it was elder, but bear with me, I keep sticking -berry on the name.

Elderberry with berries

They are shrubs or small trees with richly green long divided leaves. They produce big clusters of small white flowers that turn into brightly-colored berries.

Celebrating Oranges

There's a long tradition of putting oranges into Christmas stockings. Oranges are so readily available today that that seems a little odd. But the next time you encounter an orange, take a moment to notice it. The rich orange color. The scent, both of the whole fruit and of the brightly colored sections inside, is enticing. The wonderful sweet juice. 

orange sections

Plant Story--Tasty Goji Berries, Chinese Wolfberries, Lycium species

The familiar fruits of the U.S. are only a small portion of the fruits eaten around the world. One that appears increasingly in the U.S. is the goji berry. As with many new fruits, they have lots of names, few  in widespread use. They're called Chinese wolfberries, Chinese box thorn, Barbary box thorn, and matrimony vine. Two species are sold commercially, Lycium chinense and L. barbarum.  The Chinese name is gojizi or, in some transliterations, kouchi, which often becomes goji berry. There are other Chinese names for the fruit, such as yang-ju, and specialized Chinese names for leaves and stalks, which are used in traditional Chinese medicine.

goji berries, Lycium species, for sale in China

As dried fruit, goji berries are sweet but not very sweet. One of my books says they taste like licorice. I can detect what he thought was licorice but to me that's a very minor part of the taste. Fresh, they look like small cherry tomatoes, but are sweeter than tomatoes and lack that distinctive "tomato" flavor. 

Plant Story-- A Little Bit about Cranberries, Vaccinium species

Cranberries (usually Vaccinum macrocarpon, heath family, Ericaceae) are a major crop. The tart red berries are usually made into cranberry sauce, served on or with meat, not used as a fresh fruit or even a jam. They are a common and handsome red fruit drink, which is usually sweetened or mixed with juices like apple and grape because a juice that is pure squeezed cranberries is so tart only a few people will drink it. Cranberries are the fruits of small, sometimes viney shrubs that grow in cool boggy places. 

ohelo, Hawaiian cranberry, Vaccinium dentatum

Plant Story--Adaptable Apricots

I am going to have an apricot crop this year

One of my apricot trees: enlarge to more easily see the yellow fruits.

Plant Story--Perplexing Pumpkins

We have no problem recognizing pumpkins

and yet, botanically they're difficult.

Four plant species are "pumpkins": Cucurbita moscata, Cucurbita argyrosperma, C. maxima and Cucurbita pepo.

That would not be particularly confusing, except that those same plant species also give us summer and winter squashes. Thus, different varieties of Cucurbita pepo, for example, are acorn squash, zucchini and sugar pumpkins.

Plant Story--Bananas, Everybody's Fruit

Bananas! They dominate the world fresh fruit trade.

Banana plants cannot survive a touch of frost, and yet banana fruits are found in markets all over the world, in the depths of winter. More bananas are traded internationally than any other fruit, selling 30% more tons than then next fruit, apples.

A Bit About Tomato, the Vegetable

Tomatodirt.com asks: What is the difference between knowledge and wisdom?

>Knowledge is knowing that tomatoes are fruits. Wisdom is not serving them in a fruit salad.

Plant Story -- Pomegranates, Punica granatum, in History

pomegranates, Punica granatum 

Pomegranates are a backyard shrub if you live where there are virtually no frosts, but an exotic fruit to people in climates with cold winters. The fruit ships well enough that northern grocery stores for decades have had pomegranate fruits now and then as novelties.

It is an easy fruit to recognize:  a dull orangy red hard outer coating and inside something like 300 seeds, each in a BRIGHT red sphere of translucence. I remember my first reaction as VERY wary--they looked like red fish eyes or frog's eggs. But one taste made me a fan! Pomegranate seeds are delicious!

pomegranates with seeds

Plant Story -- Pomegranates, Punica granatum, in Story and Symbolism

A myth started me looking up pomegranates.

In Granada, Spain, last fall, the guides explained that Granada was named for pomegranates, granada in Spanish, and that the Moors had brought pomegranates to Spain. Which I heard as "the Moors brought pomegranates to Europe" since they introduced many Middle Eastern and Asian plants to Europe by planting them in Spain.

But I knew that pomegranates played an important role in Greek mythology...so the Moors couldn't have brought pomegranates to Europe.

Pomegranates appear in mythology all over the Old World. Bright red flowers, big fruit full of seeds--everyone noticed them.

Orange, oranges and carrots

Do you remember the James Burke tv series Connections showing surprising relationships between unrelated things? There are plant stories like that, for example, of orange, carrots and politics.

Wild carrots, Daucus carota, known as Queen Ann's lace in the U.S. (parsley family, Apiaceae) are native all across Europe and the Middle East. Humans have used carrots medicinally for a very long time (see for example Culpeper, 1814 edition of 1633 book; Mrs. Grieve 1932).) Carrots were first domesticated in Afghanistan, producing a readily-grown carrot that was, however, stringy and bitter. These carrots, distributed out from Afghanistan were multicolored: purple, red, orange, yellow and off-white, but especially purple and whitish. People all over Eurasia grew them for medicine, but also as a food flavoring. Like bay leaves or garlic cloves, they were added for flavor but not necessarily eaten.

About 1600, plant breeders in Holland bred a truly edible carrot. Everyone agrees that all our modern carrot varieties, even the heritage carrots, are derived from the carrot variety Long created in Holland at the beginning of the 17th century.

The Long carrot was orange.

Nobody can prove that the Dutch growers had a political agenda creating an orange carrot, but, whether or not they did, soon after that the orange carrot became very political.

Visiting China--the Markets of Dali

In Dali, Yunnan, China in 2013, we explored the ancient city (previous post on Dali, previous post on this trip

ancient city, Dali, Yunnan, China

Plant Story: the Quest for Fresh, Ripe Pineapples

pineapple plants

The story of pineapples reminds us of a time when you couldn't zip around the globe in an airplane…

Lots of bromeliads in Costa Rican trees

The pineapples we see in grocery stores are the fruit of herbaceous plants, scientifically Ananas comosus, in the bromeliad family, Bromeliaceae. The bromeliads are almost entirely confined to the New World. Most bromeliads are epiphytes, living on trees (see photo), but pineapples grow on the ground (photo above).

Pineapples were apparently domesticated prehistorically in South America and dispersed throughout all tropical America in very ancient times. 

The native people of Guadalupe, and other Caribbean islands, considered sharing pineapples a symbol of hospitality. When Columbus landed on Guadalupe on his second voyage in 1493, they offered him pineapples.

Columbus and his men thought the pineapples were delicious. Columbus called them "pine of the Indies." The men in his crew and subsequent Spaniards called pineapples piña, from "pine" in Spanish. Apparently because it reminded all of them of a pine cone. The name piña or pine for pineapples carried over into English initially. In 1633, Gerard called it the pinia or pine thistle in his Herball. (It was not included in the first edition of the Herball in 1599, the one you can find online). 

John Worledge is given credit for saying the fruit was "like a pineapple" in 1676. At that time, the word apple was used for any fruit, so a pine apple was the fruit of a pine tree, today called a pine cone. That name stuck, replacing pine of the Indies, pine thistle and older names. Despite the shared names, pineapples are obviously not much like either pines or apples.

Plant Story: Wandering Watermelons

watermelon, xigua

Everyone knows watermelon, right?  Big green fruit with red interior and black seeds. An essential part of American summer picnicking. 

So it was a surprise that In China, not just in American Chinese restaurants, watermelon is the usual dessert. The meal ends when slices of watermelon are served. 

It is a long way from Denver to Shanghai. Where is watermelon from?