Afghanistan, Cyprus, Greece, Iran, Iraq, Kriti, Lebanon-Syria, North Caucasus, Pakistan, Palestine, Tadzhikistan, Transcaucasus, Turkey, Turkmenistan, West Himalaya.
Ficus carica, commonly called common fig, is a deciduous shrub (to 10-15’ tall) or small tree (to 15-30’ tall). It is noted for its spreading habit, attractive foliage and edible fruit. Old trees with smooth silver-gray bark (sometime gnarled with age) are ornamentally attractive. Large, palmate, hairy, 3-5 lobed leaves (to 10” long) are rough dark green above and smooth light green beneath. Non-showy greenish flowers form in spring inside hollow receptacles near the branch growing tips. The fruit (edible fig) develops within each receptacle. The main fruit crop ripens in late summer or fall on new wood. In some areas, a lesser crop may appear in spring on new wood. Species plants as well as most fig cultivars are parthenocarpic (fruits develop without cross pollination).
Genus name comes from the Latin name for the edible fig.
Specific epithet refers to Caria, a region in Anatolia (Asia Minor) known for growing figs.
The edible fig is one of the first plants that were cultivated by humans. Figs were widespread in ancient Greece, and their cultivation was described by both Aristotle and Theophrastus. Aristotle noted that as in animal sexes, figs have individuals of two kinds, one (the cultivated fig) that bears fruit, and one (the wild caprifig) that assists the other to bear fruit. Further, Aristotle recorded that the fruits of the wild fig contain psenes (fig wasps); these begin life as larvae, and the adult psen splits its "skin" (pupa) and flies out of the fig to find and enter a cultivated fig, saving it from dropping. Theophrastus observed that just as date palms have male and female flowers, and that farmers (from the East) help by scattering "dust" from the male onto the female, and as a male fish releases his milt over the female's eggs, so Greek farmers tie wild figs to cultivated trees. They do not say directly that figs reproduce sexually, however.[19]
Figs were also a common food source for the Romans. Cato the Elder, in his c. 160 BC De Agri Cultura, lists several strains of figs grown at the time he wrote his handbook: the Mariscan, African, Herculanean, Saguntine, and the black Tellanian.[20] The fruits were used, among other things, to fatten geese for the production of a precursor of foie gras. Rome's first emperor, Augustus, was reputed to have been poisoned with figs from his garden smeared with poison by his wife Livia.[21][22] For this reason, or perhaps because of her horticultural expertise, a variety of fig known as the Liviana was cultivated in Roman gardens.
Fig (Ficus carica L.) is one of the oldest cultivated and consumed fruits worldwide. More than 800 varieties of the Ficus carica genus are cultivated in a warm climate.