Common figs and Smyrna figs

Cultivated figs are usually sorted into four horticultural types according to how they set fruit.¹

Common figs develop fruit without pollination. The flowers inside are all female and the fruit is parthenocarpic, meaning it matures without fertilisation. Almost every variety sold for home gardens, including Brown Turkey, Chicago Hardy, Celeste, Kadota and Black Mission, is a common fig. This is why a single tree in a New York yard, thousands of miles from any fig wasp, produces fruit every year.

Smyrna figs need pollination to hold their crop. Without it the young fruit drops. Pollination is carried out by the tiny fig wasp, Blastophaga psenes, which breeds inside the inedible caprifig. The famous Calimyrna fig of California is a Smyrna type, and growing it commercially only became possible after the wasp was established there in 1899.¹

Caprifigs are the wild-type fig with male flowers. They are not eaten but grown as hosts for the wasp.

San Pedro figs are in between: their first, breba crop sets without pollination but the main crop needs it.

What this means for jam

Only the common and Smyrna types matter for the kitchen, and for home growers it is essentially all common figs. Pollinated figs, with their fertile seeds, are often described as having a nuttier texture, which is one reason dried Calimyrna figs taste different from dried Mission figs.

Caprification

Hanging branches of caprifigs, wasps and all, in a Smyrna orchard so the wasps carry pollen into the edible figs is called caprification. It has been practised around the Mediterranean since antiquity.¹