The Story of Fig

This is Ficus carica, the edible fig.

How it was found

Kew maps Ficus carica from the eastern Mediterranean to Central Asia and the western Himalaya. Native to: Afghanistan, Cyprus, Greece, Iran, Iraq, Crete, Lebanon-Syria, North Caucasus, Pakistan, Palestine, Tadzhikistan, Transcaucasus, Turkmenistan, Türkiye, and West Himalaya. Jepson: native to southwestern Asia. UC Master Gardeners of San Luis Obispo County: native to Western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean region.

GRIN gives a broader native table that includes North Africa, and notes that the exact native range is obscure.

San Diego Master Gardeners: considered by historians to be the first of the domesticated crops, with evidence stretching back more than five millennia. UC SLO Master Gardeners: cultivated for thousands of years. Those are domestication-and-diet sentences, not Kew’s native-range map.

How people used it

Kew use classes include food, animal food, medicine, poison, environmental uses, and social uses. Jepson: commonly cultivated. GRIN: human food (fruit); also cultivated widely in tropics and subtropics.

The thing we call a fig is not a simple fruit. UC SLO: figs are not technically fruit but flask-shaped modified stems encasing numerous tiny flowers. San Diego Master Gardeners: botanically a syconium. Medicine is listed on Kew without a named folk recipe.

Timeline

1. More than five millennia (SD MG)

   Among the first domesticated crops

   San Diego Master Gardeners print that figs have long been part of the cultivated human diet, with evidence stretching back more than five millennia, and that historians consider fig among the first domesticated crops.

   San Diego Master Gardeners

2. 1753

   Named in Species Plantarum

   Linnaeus published Ficus carica in Species Plantarum: 1059. Kew accepts the species (family Moraceae; tree of the temperate biome).

   Kew POWO

3. 1769

   Mission San Diego, the Mission fig

   UC SLO Master Gardeners and San Diego Master Gardeners write that figs were first planted in California at Mission San Diego (Mission San Diego de Alcalá) in 1769. SD MG: the dark-purple variety the priests planted became known as the Mission fig. That is California’s dated arrival, not the crop’s first domestication.

   UC SLO Master Gardeners; San Diego Master Gardeners

4. Present (California production, SD MG)

   Almost all U.S. figs

   San Diego Master Gardeners print California as producing 100% of the nation’s dried figs and 98% of the fresh figs. A Mediterranean crop became a California packing story.

   San Diego Master Gardeners

Cool to know

Growing notes for this plant live on the Plant Wiki.