Figs, or the Fruit That Refuses to Travel
There is a fig tree growing out of a wall near where I am staying, and I mean that almost literally: it has forced its roots into a crack in the old stone, perhaps three metres up, and hangs there sideways over the lane, unwatered, unplanted, unasked for, dropping ripe figs onto the pavement below where they burst into small purple catastrophes that the wasps attend to with tremendous enthusiasm. Nobody owns this tree. Nobody tends it. It is, by the standards of the fruit I usually write about — the coddled apricot, the fussy cherry — an absolute vandal, thriving in conditions that would kill a more respectable plant, and producing, twice a year, some of the best fruit in the world for precisely no one and everyone. This is the first thing to understand about the fig: it grows like a weed across the whole Mediterranean and well beyond it, in the poorest soil, out of walls and ruins and roadsides, with a stubborn peasant hardiness that sits oddly against the fruit's repu...
