Ficus palmata

Cultivation Details

Ficus palmata is a plant of the warm temperate to subtropical zones, also found at higher elevations of 1,000 metres or more in the tropics. Young growth, even on mature plants, is frost-tender. Requires a well-drained medium to light loam and some lime rubble incorporated into the soil. A heavy wet soil tends to encourage excessive plant growth at the expense of fruit. This species has been recommended for growing in areas where the climate is too wet for common figs (Ficus carica) since it fruits during the monsoon season in the Himalayas. However, it probably requires the fig-wasp in order to pollinate the flowers and so is unlikely to fruit in areas that are too cold for the fig-wasp to survive. Annual yields from wild trees is about 25kg^[1]. There is a potential for commercial cultivation^[1]. Fig trees have a unique form of fertilization, each species relying on a single, highly specialized species of wasp that is itself totaly dependant upon that fig species in order to breed. The trees produce three types of flower; male, a long-styled female and a short-styled female flower, often called the gall flower. All three types of flower are contained within the structure we usually think of as the fruit. The female fig wasp enters a fig and lays its eggs on the short styled female flowers while pollinating the long styled female flowers. Wingless male fig wasps emerge first, inseminate the emerging females and then bore exit tunnels out of the fig for the winged females. Females emerge, collect pollen from the male flowers and fly off in search of figs whose female flowers are receptive. In order to support a population of its pollinator, individuals of a Ficus spp. must flower asynchronously. A population must exceed a critical minimum size to ensure that at any time of the year at least some plants have overlap of emmission and reception of fig wasps. Without this temporal overlap the short-lived pollinator wasps will go locally extinct^[2].