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.