Curated playlist
Fruit trees
- CherryA Roman general brought a cultivated cherry home from Anatolia in 72 BCE.
- PeachThe peach is named for Persia, yet every thread of its origin leads back to China.
- GrapefruitOne glass of grapefruit juice can push some medicines to overdose levels.
- WalnutA walnut shell grit clog helped bring down a US Army helicopter. The 1982 Chinook crash ended its aviation use.
- LemonThe lemon is not a wild species but a cross of two other fruits. It came from the citron and the bitter orange.
- AlmondThe almond is not a nut, but a stone fruit related to the peach and the plum. The part we eat is its seed.
- CoconutEvery coconut on a remote Pacific island arrived because a person brought it. Ocean currents alone could not do it.
- Mandarin orangeThe sweet mandarin orange descends from a bitter wild fruit. The pomelo gave most mandarins their sweetness.
- AvocadoEvery Hass avocado tree alive descends from one mother tree. A California mail carrier raised it from a single seedling.
- Date palmThe date palm, Phoenix dactylifera, has grown seven trees named Methuselah, Hannah, Adam, Judith, Boaz, Jonah and Uriel. Each one sprouted from a seed about 2000 years old that had been stored by accident. The seeds came from a cultivar…
- QuinceThe quince, Cydonia oblonga, can grow as heavy as one kilogram and still be too tart to bite into. Its skin turns a bright golden yellow and its aroma carries, yet the flesh stays hard and astringent. It looks much like a pear and belongs…
- OliveThe olive, a subtropical evergreen tree that botanists call Olea europaea, once led the writer Georges Duhamel to remark that the "Mediterranean ends where the olive tree no longer grows." That is a large claim for a short, squat tree…
- CashewThe largest cashew tree in the world stands in Parnamirim, Brazil, and its canopy covers around 7500 square metres. That is a single plant of the species Anacardium occidentale, a tropical evergreen native to South America. Most people…
- ChestnutChestnut trees belong to the genus Castanea, and the most famous of them grows on the slopes of Mount Etna. The Hundred Horse Chestnut measured 57.9 metres, or 190 feet, in circumference in 1780. By 1883 the figure had reached 64 metres.…
- Areca nutThe areca nut is chewed by around 600 million people, mainly of South and Southeast Asian origin. It leaves red stains on pavements from South Asia to the northern Philippines. This seed of a tropical palm, also called betel nut, acts as a…
- Juglans regiaWitches were said to gather at a walnut tree in Benevento, Italy. A judge wrote about them in 1526.
- BreadfruitA single breadfruit tree can hand a household 200 or more grapefruit-sized fruits in one season, and it asks for very little care in return. That makes Artocarpus altilis one of the highest-yielding food plants known. It belongs to…
- PomeloThe pomelo is the largest citrus fruit on Earth. A single fruit can measure anywhere from 10 to 30 centimetres across. Depending on the cultivar, its weight runs from 0.26 kilograms up to 1.95 kilograms. Botanists call it Citrus maxima,…
- Asimina trilobaAsimina triloba, the American pawpaw, is a small deciduous tree of eastern North American forests that bears a fruit with a custard-like texture. Ohio botanist William B. Werthner once wrote that the fruit is sweet and a little puckery,…
- Morus (plant)Morus is a genus of deciduous trees with 19 species, and the three names most people attach to it are misleading. White, red and black mulberries are named for the color of their dormant buds, not for the color of their fruit. The genus is…
- CitronAsk for a citron in a French market and you will be handed a lemon. The French word for the fruit that English speakers call a citron is cédrat, and the two languages have been confusing each other for centuries. The true citron, known to…