Fig

Family

Moraceae

Habit

Tree

Height

6 m

Spread

6 m

Growth

medium

Lifespan

40 years

First yield

after 3 years

Productive years

17 years

Yield per plant

up to 100 kg a year

Yield in cultivation

up to 15 t/ha

Energy yield

500 kcal per m² a year

Hardiness

zone 6–11

Shade tolerance

full sun

Soil

Sand, Silt, Loam, Clay

Soil moisture

dry – very moist

pH

6 – 7.5

Planned in gardens

7×

Times apply to the northern hemisphere in a temperate climate and shift with altitude and cultivar.

Edible: Fruit can be consumed raw or cooked and is sweet, juicy, and exquisite when fully ripe, almost melting in the mouth. Dried fruit is a valuable commodity, with figs being pear-shaped and up to 5 cm in diameter. The latex from the juice is useful for curdling plant milk, and a nutritional analysis is provided.

Medicinal: The gum resin extracted from the root has medicinal properties such as anthelmintic, antispasmodic, expectorant, and nervine. It is utilized for treating asthma, whooping cough, gas colic, pneumonia, and bronchitis in children. The plant's leaves have carminative and diaphoretic effects. Studies have explored its possible contraceptive properties.

Other uses: Fig wood is light, soft and porous and has little role as timber, though between the 13th and 15th centuries it was valued for the wooden panels of panel painting. The milky sap held in all green parts of the plant is of more practical interest: it contains the protein-splitting enzyme ficin and is traditionally used to curdle milk and plant-based milk alternatives. Heavily roasted dried figs were once processed into a coffee additive, fig coffee, now only rarely offered. Note that the sap of leaves and shoots contains psoralen and bergapten; ripe fruits are free of both.

Site: The fig needs warmth and above all shelter from bare frost; north of the Alps it succeeds only in a wine-growing climate or on urban heat islands, against a south wall, in a courtyard or trained on a trellis. It roots shallowly and widely and competes for water near beds; confining the roots, for instance with a buried tub, keeps that in check and improves fruit set at the same time. Ripe fruit drops, leaves sticky marks on paving and draws wasps, so a seat directly beneath it is unwise. The milky sap of leaves and shoots irritates skin, which is a nuisance along narrow paths. Care: Poor soil suits it, wet and heavy soil does not, since there it grows lushly and sets little fruit. Give nitrogen sparingly: too much lowers frost hardiness and delays ripening. Cultivars such as 'Brown Turkey', 'Ronde de Bordeaux' or 'Brunswick' take about -15 °C; below that the wood dies back and the crop is lost, because the fig bears on one-year-old wood. It usually reshoots from the rootstock. For winter protection use a 10 to 15 cm layer of leaves over the root zone and tie the branches together wrapped in jute, never plastic; the lowest 50 cm matter most. A light cut back in March encourages side shoots.

The fig is so easily propagated vegetatively that little else is worth the effort. Hardwood cuttings are the usual route: well-ripened one- to two-year-old shoots, 25 to 30 cm long and no more than 1.5 cm thick, cut in late winter and inserted in free-draining medium, root within a few weeks given bottom heat; two- and three-year-old wood and thicker branch sections also take. Layering and detached root suckers work equally well, the latter being available anyway on plants that have died back. All these routes give plants true to type, which matters because Central Europe depends on parthenocarpic cultivars. Seedlings, by contrast, are a genetic mixture and largely produce fruitless caprifigs; sowing is left to breeders. Set young plants out in spring, about 10 cm deeper than they stood in the pot.

In its native range the fig maintains one of the closest plant-insect relationships known: the flowers sit inside the urn-shaped receptacle and are pollinated solely by the fig wasp, an insect only a few millimetres long that shuttles between caprifigs and edible figs and completes its own life cycle in the process. That wasp is absent from Central Europe, which is why almost only parthenocarpic cultivars of the Adriatic type are grown here, setting fruit without any pollination. For the regional insect fauna the fig therefore offers very little; there are practically no regular flower visitors, and the fig leaf moth appears only sporadically. What does get used is the ripe fruit, taken by blackbirds, starlings and wasps.

Special features: one of the oldest cultivated plants - finds near Jericho ~11,400 years old, predating arable farming; in central Europe only parthenocarpic cultivars of the Adriatic type, since the fig wasp as sole pollinator is absent here; bears on one-year-old wood -> dieback costs the whole crop; hardy to zone 6, but fruit-bearing shoots die back earlier; needs a site sheltered from wind+cold; confine the shallow roots horizontally

South-west Asia and the Mediterranean. The wild form of the fig is not known with certainty; its home is presumed to lie on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea and in the Pontic Mountains, yet genetic work on mitochondrial DNA suggests the species is native throughout the Mediterranean basin. Today it occurs across that whole region and has widely escaped from cultivation; commercial production centres on Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco and Iran. North of the Alps it persists on mild winter sites: along the Rhine, Moselle, Main and Elbe, in the Breisgau, on the Bergstrasse, in the Ruhr and the Dresden Elbe valley, naturalised figs grow on walls, railway embankments and urban wasteland. It has also established itself on Heligoland and the Danish Baltic islands.

The fig occupies dry, sun-exposed sites on deep but freely draining ground, from sea level to around 1,700 m. Its affinity for rock is characteristic: it roots in crevices, scree and old masonry, where a far-reaching root system taps moisture from depth, and it copes with nutrient-poor substrates while doing so. Waterlogging and persistently wet soil suit it badly, salt in the soil rather well, which explains its occurrence near coasts. In the semi-arid mountain regions of Iran a cold-tolerant mountain form grows on open dry slopes.