Fig

The fig, Ficus carica, is one of the earliest cultivated fruit trees of the Near East, and it holds a prominent place in the Bible. In Genesis, Adam and Eve, their eyes opened after eating the forbidden fruit, sew fig leaves together to cover themselves, the first clothing and the first shame. To sit under one's own vine and fig tree became, throughout the Hebrew scriptures, the settled image of peace, security and prosperity. In the Gospels Jesus curses a barren fig tree that bears leaves but no fruit, an enacted parable of fruitless profession.

The fig's biology is genuinely remarkable and was not understood until the nineteenth century: what looks like a single fruit is actually an inverted cluster of tiny flowers enclosed within a fleshy receptacle, pollinated in most wild fig species by a specific, tiny fig wasp that enters through a narrow pore, mates and lays eggs inside, a precise one-to-one relationship between fig species and wasp species found nowhere else in the plant kingdom on such a scale. Cultivated edible figs today mostly rely on varieties that no longer need this wasp pollination at all, a horticultural workaround for one of the strangest partnerships in nature.

A different fig is one of the holiest trees of the East. The Buddha attained enlightenment seated beneath a pipal or sacred fig, Ficus religiosa, at Bodh Gaya, and that species is revered ever since as the Bodhi tree, the tree of awakening, its heart-shaped leaves an emblem of the Buddhist path. The same tree, the ashvattha, is sacred in Hinduism, praised in the Bhagavad Gita as the cosmic tree with its roots above and branches below, and worshipped as a dwelling of the gods. Across the traditions the fig gathers meanings of covering and shame, of peace and plenty, and of the very tree beneath which enlightenment was won.

The specific tree venerated at Bodh Gaya today is not the original: various accounts describe the first tree being damaged or deliberately destroyed more than once in ancient times, and the tree now growing there is understood to be descended, by cutting and replanting, from the Sri Maha Bodhi at Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka, itself said to have grown from a sapling of the original tree brought from India in the third century BCE by Sangamitta, daughter of the emperor Ashoka. If the traditional lineage is accepted, the Anuradhapura tree is among the oldest planted trees in the world with a continuous, historically documented planting date, a claim of religious history that intersects unusually directly with verifiable botanical age.