What is a fig, actually?

Botanically speaking, a fig is not a fruit. It's a syconium: a stem tip that swelled up, folded in on itself, and lined its inside with hundreds of tiny flowers. When you bite into a fig, you're eating a bouquet that bloomed in the dark and never once saw the sun.

The parts that matter

• The skin is the receptacle — the swollen stem tissue that wraps everything. Its colour (green, yellow, brown, purple, near-black) is the first thing a variety is judged on and the least reliable guide to what's inside.
• The pulp is the flowers. Every soft, sweet strand in there is a flower that opened inward. The colour of the pulp — amber, pink, strawberry, dark red — is a much better clue to flavour than the skin.
• The seeds are the true fruits: tiny drupelets, one per flower. They're what crunches. In most garden figs they're hollow, which is a story for the next lesson.
• The eye, or ostiole, is the small opening at the bottom. It's the only way in. Whether it's tight or loose decides how a variety handles rain, ants and humidity.
• The neck is the narrow bit between fruit and branch. Watch it: when a fig is ripe, the neck goes soft and the whole fruit droops on the tree like it's fallen asleep.

Why the eye matters more than it looks

A fig with a wide, open eye lets in rain, which ferments the sugars, and lets in insects, which do the same. That's why a variety that's superb in a dry Central Valley summer can be a sour, split disappointment in a humid one. Growers in wet climates hunt for closed-eye varieties, and some figs even seal their own eye with a drop of honey as they ripen. When you see "closed eye" on a variety page, that's what it's about.

Two crops on one tree

Many figs fruit twice a year: a small early crop called the breba on last year's wood, and the main crop on this year's growth. Which one matters depends entirely on your climate — a whole lesson, here.