Fruits of Halibut Point

All fruit develop from flowers. Flowering plants, the modern edge of vegetative evolution, universally depend on fruit for the success of their seeds. These truisms shape the botanical definition of fruit, which is more precise than the culinary one that classifies corn, beans, and tomatoes with the vegetables. Botanists view fruits more scientifically than do grocers.

Black cherries

Cherries are ripening now in a bumper crop because of the season's excellent rain pattern. When fully mature with a deep purplish black color they offer a zesty if astringent flavor in a pea-sized package. An experimental sample puts a wine-like taste on your tongue. Trees dispersed throughout the State Park can flavor your whole loop around Halibut Point.

Tupelo drupes

Like the cherry trees, tupelos also form drupes, seeds inside a stony pit surrounded by an edible layer that compensates birds for distributing the seeds far and wide.

Tree swallows plucking bayberry drupes on the wing

Up and down the shoreline tree swallows are fattening up on bayberry drupes for their imminent migration.

Sumac, the "Lemonade Tree"

The tiny drupes of sumac trees make a tangy drink. Steep the clusters in hot water or dry and store them for winter refreshment. The juice also inspires an adventurous cocktail.

Crabapples

Fruit of the apple clan are easy to recognize as sweet, sour, and juicy. The succulent structures grow out of other parts of the flower than the ovaries, placing them in a category called pomes.

Rosa virginiana fruit

Rose fruit are similarly structured but without appreciable assets for our diet. Their small size might lead us to think of them mistakenly as berries rather than pomes.

Nightshade berries

Berries are produced from the ovary of a single flower in which the outer layer of the ovary wall develops into a fleshy edible portion. For example bittersweet nightshade, a vine clambering  malodorously around Halibut Point, is a close relative of fruit-producing tomatoes, eggplants and potatoes.

Grapes



Cranberries

Grapes and cranberries are among the native berries of Halibut Point. Bananas, watermelons, and avocados are berries that have not yet proven hardy here. Pumpkin berries are currently attaining immense bulk in local gardens.

Cedar waxwing eating honeysuckle berry

Humanly toxic honeysuckle berries should be left to the birds.

Catbrier berries

Barberries

Catbrier and barberries produce fruit edible to birds and potentially to people.

Strawberries

On the other hand the several kinds of strawberries growing wild on Halibut Point are botanically not true berries. Like raspberries and blackberries they are derived from a single flower with more than one ovary, making them aggregate fruit rather than berries. *

Hickory nuts

When a flower's ovary wall develops into a hard shell it produces a fruit called a nut with a seed at the center. 


Fruit of grasses

Grass seeds also develop within a thickened ovary wall to form a fruit grain.

Devil's beggar-ticks

You and I have from time to time helped distribute fruit of the Devil's beggar tick as burrs stuck to clothing.

Black swallowwort

Black swallowwort enlists the wind in its distribution plan.
 

Juniper "berries"

Circling back to a primary botanical distinction, all fruits come from flower-bearing plants, the angiosperms. Cone-bearing plants, the gymnosperms such as pines and junipers, never have flower structures nor, technically, fruit. Their seeds are not surrounded by fruit tissue. The term comes from the Greek meaning 'naked seed.'

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* Technically a strawberry is an aggregate accessory fruit, meaning that the fleshy part is derived not from the plant's ovaries but from the receptacle that holds the ovaries. Each apparent "seed" (achene) on the outside of the fruit is actually one of the ovaries of the flower, with a seed inside it.