Strange Fruit

Pennsylvania is a state known for its cultivated fruit – grapes, apples, peaches, cherries, strawberries, blueberries, and more – and many home gardeners maintain their own home fruit plantings. But if you want a fruit salad out of the ordinary, or perhaps some strangely spooky autumn décor, consider some of these unusual fruits that will thrive in most areas of Pennsylvania.

Stinky Apricot

Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) is a "living fossil" tree related to gymnosperms (conifers) that has existed for over 250 million years and at one time, about 7 million years ago, was widespread in America. Its unique fan-shaped leaves and adaptability to less than ideal landscape conditions make it an attractive ornamental tree. It has separate male and female trees; only the female trees bear "fruit" – botanically, it is not a fruit, but a hard seed encased in a soft fleshy covering that looks like an apricot. Unfortunately, as the fruit matures and drops from the tree, it develops a fetid "what did I step in" shoe-checking, retch-inducing odor that accounts for primarily male cultivars being planted in landscapes. Nevertheless, the hard kernel inside the stinky flesh is a popular treat in Asia, with a sweet taste after being steamed or roasted. Ginkgo is a long-lived tree; because it can take 20 to 30 years for the trees to begin fruiting, older trees in the landscape that were started from seeds may turn out to be female. There are a limited number of female cultivars available, if you dare.

Witches' Fingernails

Medlar (Mespilus germanica) is a small and highly ornamental tree, native to Eurasia, that has been cultivated for millennia and was often included in monastery gardens during the Middle Ages, but now is little known or grown. A member of the rose family (Rosaceae), hardy to at least Zone 5 and growing to a height of about 10 to 20 feet, it has beautiful pinkish-white flowers in the spring and large, dark green, oblong leaves that turn orange, yellow, and russet in autumn. The fruit is a small, dark brown spheroid, with five prominent, persistent, and hairy sepals emerging around the concave blossom end. The fruit is hard and very sour until it has been "bletted." After a hard frost, the fruit is picked and ripened for several weeks, turning the flesh to a mushy brown consistency, but developing a flavor akin to spicy applesauce. (Our native persimmon is another fruit that must be bletted to become palatable.)

Drops of Blood

Cornelian cherry (Cornus mas) is similar to medlar in several respects: a small, lovely ornamental tree, native to Eurasia, cultivated for thousands of years and a common feature of monastery gardens during the Middle Ages, and now little grown, at least in the United States; it is still a popular fruit in parts of eastern Europe and Turkey. But, unlike medlar, it is a member of the dogwood family (Cornaceae), related to our familiar native flowering dogwood (Cornus florida), and not related to cherries at all. Cornelian cherry can be grown as a large shrub or small tree, about 15 to 20 feet in height; its clusters of small, star-shaped, golden yellow flowers envelop the leafless tree very early in spring, before most plants have even thought about leafing out or flowering. The fruit, a small, oblong drupe like a cherry, shiny bright red in color but sometimes partially obscured by the glossy dark green foliage, ripens in mid to late summer; very high in vitamin C, it is also very tart until fully ripe.

Pink Pox

Kousa dogwood (Cornus kousa) is another member of the dogwood family (Cornaceae), native to Japan, Korea, and China, and a great ornamental tree of moderate size (20 to 30 feet in height and spread) that is widely grown in the United States for its outstanding floral display. It has been hybridized with our native flowering dogwood to develop beautiful cultivars resistant to dogwood anthracnose and dogwood borer. The fruits receive less press than the floral bracts but are just as conspicuous when they mature in late summer through autumn. They are about 1 inch in diameter, pinkish-red, looking akin to a large, knobby raspberry, and surprisingly edible, although opinions about palatability vary; they are high in pectin, so good for preserves, but they can also be eaten fresh, with juicy flesh and many seeds.

Mammoth Brain Food

Osage orange (Maclura pomifera), also called hedge-apple, is a tree native to the south-central United States but now naturalized in much of the eastern United States. The tree is incredibly adaptable to poor growing conditions and was long used to create hedgerows in the Midwest; its wood is extremely rot-resistant and was also used to make bows. The heavy fruit, about the size of a grapefruit, with a yellow-green, convoluted skin, ripens in the fall and drops to the ground late in the season. The fruit is not edible for humans; and although squirrels will sometimes eat the seeds from decaying fruit over the winter months, the fruit itself is too large for most animals to consume. Some scientists have speculated that it was eaten by wild horses and other ice age megafauna before they became extinct about 13,000 years ago.

Green Fingers

Pawpaw (Asimina triloba), also called papaw, asimoya, or prairie banana, is a small tree to 30 feet that spreads clonally in the shade of the forest canopy and bears fruit, either singly or in small clusters originating from a single flower, that resembles a squat banana. Native to the southeastern United States, its range extends into the southern half of Pennsylvania, and it is unusual as the hardiest outlier of the custard-apple family (Annonaceae), a tropical group of plants that includes some other strange fruits, such as cherimoya and soursop. The leaves of the pawpaw are large, long, dark green, and droop as if languishing in the heat of the tropics, but brighten to yellow in autumn before falling. The fruit ripens in early autumn, with the skin color turning from yellow to green and finally blackish; the ripe flesh inside is aromatic, soft, and custardy, tasting of a tropical mix of mango and banana. It holds several large black seeds that should not be eaten; as with the Osage orange, it has been posited that now-extinct mega mammals consumed and dispersed the seeds.

If you are on the lookout for stranger things, these fruits will fit the bill as well as grow in your backyard. All are unusual, whether in taste, smell, appearance, provenance, or natural history; and all would add some creepy vibes to your Halloween decorations. For more information about these and other strange fruits, I recommend two books: Fruit & Nuts by Susanna Lyle (Timber Press, 2006) and Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden by Lee Reich (Timber Press, 2004).