Curated category
Fruit trees
- CherryCherry is one of those fruits so ordinary it almost disappears into the background of daily life. A bowl at a summer picnic, a garnish on a cocktail…
- PeachThe peach, Prunus persica, carries a name that points to Persia, yet every thread of its origin leads back to China. That mismatch between name and…
- GrapefruitGrapefruit carries a name that has puzzled people for centuries. A fruit that looks nothing like a grape earned that label sometime in the early 19th…
- WalnutWalnuts occupy a strange botanical category: they look like drupes, they act like drupes, but they are not drupes. The outer covering of the walnut fruit is…
- LemonThe lemon, known to botanists as Citrus x limon, is a hybrid fruit that has travelled from the foothills of northwestern India to nearly every kitchen…
- AlmondEach February, more than 1 million beehives are loaded onto trucks and driven across the United States to a single crop in California.
- CoconutCoconut, Cocos nucifera, may be the single plant most responsible for human civilizations reaching distant shores. The Austronesian peoples who crossed open…
- Mandarin orangeThe mandarin orange is heavy for its size, firm to slightly soft, and its pebbly skin slips away in a single thin piece.
- AvocadoThe avocado is an evergreen tree of the laurel family, and its fruit is botanically a large berry built around a single oversized seed.
- Juglans regiaJuglans regia goes by many names: common walnut, English walnut, Persian walnut. None of them quite captures what this tree actually is.