232 THE BOOK OF USEFUL PLANTS 



soften and turn brown or reddish, or the green 

 merely fades out. 



To find the fig blossoms, one must cut open the 

 green body of the fruit. There they are, hundreds 

 of tiny flowers that stand close as the disk flowers 

 on a head of sunflower or dandelion. Draw 

 together the edges of a sunflower disk, and you 

 make a bag, with the flowers lining it. The fig is 

 like that: the fleshy receptacle forms the wall of 

 the sac. One little opening leads from the outside 

 world. A small dimple in the end opposite the 

 stem shows you this door. It is important that 

 you see it. 



Under each little flower is a seed. Break open 

 a ripe fig, and the seeds are thick, under the 

 pointed remnants of the many flowers. Mul- 

 berries and figs are closely related. The mulberry 

 in flower has its receptacle covered with crowded, 

 tiny flowers, each of which produces a soft berry, 

 that is one of the many crowded together in a 

 single mulberry fruit an inch long. If we can 

 imagine a mulberry with its tiny berries on the 

 inside it would be made like a fig. A fig turned 

 inside out would be changed to the mulberry 

 pattern. The likeness of the two is in having 

 many flowers attached to the surface of a fleshy 

 base. No matter what shape this base takes 



