I grew up believing fig trees were the frailest of all fruit-bearing plants. We had two, which my dad and I overwintered into the ground every fall. I thought them cowards for not standing up to our cold Canadian climate, and I resented the trench-digging, tree-bending, back-breaking inconvenience they put us through for the handful of figs they yielded every year.
I was too young and New World to recognize we weren’t cultivating these trees to reap a bountiful harvest, for one solitary late-August fig sufficed to gift my parents a taste of home.
While staying with my aunt and uncle in my mom’s village in Calabria, we awoke every morning to a basket of fresh figs my uncle picked at sunup before leaving for work. My mom and aunt would have a token few, charitably leaving the rest for my dad and me to polish off at breakfast.
That same plentifulness found me forty years later, in Platanaki, where I picked and ate enough figs this summer to pump a winter’s supply of potassium and dietary fibre in my bloodstream. Thankfully, despite the house sitting empty and unlived-in for three years, the fig trees managed to do what their walnut, almond, peach and prune counterparts could not: survive.
These two trips, decades apart, to the fig paradises that are southern Italy and Greece, forever buried whatever misconceptions I harboured about the fig tree’s strength and output.
It turns out figs are deliciously mystifying, a pear-shaped binary ecosystem of point and counterpoint, nature’s own fugue.
I love that they have their own pollinating wasps, fig wasps, and that their lifecycles are so intertwined after coevolving together over thousands of years, one is unable to thrive without the other; that possibly the most bruising-prone fruit can grow from one of the toughest trees to sprout from ground; that figs can moonlight as omens of prosperity and abundance in biblical tradition, and traffic in cultish rites and Bacchanalian revelry in classical antiquity.
Most of all, I admire their pluck in advocating for the often maligned low-hanging fruit; in uprooting the apocryphal notion that the sunkissed fruit dwells exclusively on the penthouse floor of its tree. Of all the figs I picked under the Platanaki sky this summer, the ones that came off the stem most effortlessly and tasted the sweetest were invariably within arm’s length of the earth’s surface.
No fuss, no Icarian hubris, just the wilted neck of the fruit, the beads of nectar around the eye, the cracked skin, the gravitational pull toward the soil, the simplicity of the manifest choice when it yields the gratifyingly small act of seizing what nature gifts you.