Attached to that, the purplish, cone-shaped item at the picture's top, left, is the former blossom's pedicel, enlarging to form what will become known as the fruit's receptacle, more technically known as the hypocarpium. Only if you find a flower that's already been pollinated, the petals and stamens have fallen off, and the ovary has begun enlarging to form a fruit can you start seeing the beginnings of a cashew fruit, as shown at the left side of the image shown below:Īt the bottom, left in that image, that's the swelling ovary, the future fruit. The cream-colored, curved item is the ovary's stigma-tipped style. The flower has five recurved, purple-striped petals and as many green calyx sepals. When the flowers are blossoming, they show no indications that they're going to produce such a weird looking fruit, as you can see below: Dangling among the flowers, they look like fat, green, C-shaped worms wearing purplish dunce caps. But look at those fruits, of which two appear in the above picture. You can see that the leathery, evergreen leaves are interestingly rounded at their tips, and that the leaves' veins form a "herringbone pattern." The many, small flowers are fairly normal looking for the Cashew Family, being disposed in panicle-type inflorescences at the tips of branches. Once you learn them, you don't forget them, even if they're just starting to form among the flowers, as shown at the top of this page. I knew they were Cashews, ANACARDIUM OCCIDENTALE of the Cashew/Poison Ivy Family, the Anacardiaceae, because Cashew fruits are among the weirdest-looking of all fruits. Last March 31, during my camping trip into northern Guatemala's Petén department, while exploring little gravel roads on the south side of Sayaxché, several Cashew trees turned up planted near people's houses, next to the road. From the Newsletter entry issued from Tepakán, Yucatán, MÉXICO
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