Our neighbour, an aging farmer, planted for us some fig stocks (boutures). He took stems as thick as a finger and thrust them forty centimetres down in the ground. You cannot grow them from seed.

Figs are not native. They come originally from east of Egypt and have been cultivated for 5,000 years. I am somewhat thankful that I eat the *cultivated* fig. Some of its relatives have sexual processes which might turn one against them. But let me start at the beginning. Where are the flowers? Figs have as fruits those strange soft swellings but it seems no flowers. I use the word 'fruits', for lack of another term. They are swollen flower bases. It happens that the true flowers are hidden inside them. Each of the thread like structures you see within is a flower, and in those we eat, every one is a female. At the bottom of the 'fruit' is a tiny hole. The seeds in figs normally grown in France never mature, and all one sees are tiny non viable pips. All the fig trees we commonly see have only female flowers. As far as I know, no commercial fig tree in France has male flowers.

Oddly, it is not the case that the trees are either male or female. Trees may be female, but other trees have 'fruits' with a particular blend of male and female flowers; the latter having a certain and rather weird function. These male plus female 'fruits' are called caprifigs. In ancient times these inferior figs were fed to goats (caprum Latin for goat). Such caprifigs in those countries where they occur are largely full of flowers carrying pollen but also there are some female ones…and also wasps! These wasps are nothing like the large familiar species. These are only 2 mm. long. They lay eggs in the female flowers of the caprifigs, which remember are surrounded with large numbers of pollen laden male flowers, and these eggs become either male or female wasps. The males mate and die. At last a new generation of female wasps each well dusted with pollen escapes through the hole (now old and fairly wide) at the bottom of every fig. Each wasp has eggs ready to be laid, and they fly to either the true female flowered figs or the caprifigs, squeezing in through the tight bottom hole of the young structure and often tearing off their wings as they do so. Their desire is to lay eggs, but in so doing they pollinate the flowers, which then produce viable seed. It so happens that the female flowers of the caprifigs are differently formed from the female flowers of the edible fruit. So when the wasps attempt to lay eggs in the latter flowers the task fails.

In California they cultivate a variety which has to be so pollinated. In that variety non pollinated fig fruits will shrivel and fall. The viable seeds impart a rich nutty flavour to the fig, but it also contains some dead female wasps. I am happy that this does not happen with the French varieties.

We must be thankful that the process is not as complex as in other exotic species of fig, where the life cycle of the fig-wasp is also assisted by the presence of bacteria and nematode worms!

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