A fig for Flower Friday

The fine weather has ripened my two remaining figs to perfection.

But it's a fruit? Well, yes and no. It's actually an inside-out flower, technically called a syconium. The pink fleshy mass inside is a cluster of tiny flowers. Although figs can ripen to sweetness in our temperate climate, they never  turn into proper fruit because in order to do so a certain minute wasp is required. It's the only one small enough (2 mm.) to crawl inside the syconium and pollinate the flowers. That's why we don't get the crunchy seeds familiar from dried figs.
 These specialized wasps need another sort of fig, the inedible caprifig or goat fig, in which to lay their eggs and to act as a nursery for the larvae. . Caprifigs grow only in Asia Minor (and have been introduced into the fig-growing parts of America) which is why the best, truly ripe figs come  from Turkey and California. 

Our virgin figs, though very good and a real treat in West Wales, remain in the end just unfertilized flowers.