Ficus palmata

Ficus palmata commonly known as bedu or Punjab fig is one of the tallest wild fig commonly found in Uttarakhand in Mid-himalayan region. The fruit is quite tasty and grows around villages, forest, wastelands, fields etc.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ficus_palmata

 

Twenty years ago, when we were young and hard-working students, we enjoyed Sukkot and Passover vacations in Sinai. We would go hiking for ten days in the high mountains of South Sinai and then relax on the beach – a perfect vacation, so far from today’s reality.

In the high mountains of South Sinai, amongst the rocks and near the springs, we encountered a special tree. At first sight, it looked like the common fig tree, but its trunk was whiter and its leaves were smaller, rigid, and mostly unlobed. In autumn we found small, dark, fig-like fruit on the trees. Their taste went from sweet to pungent, a surprising culinary desert boon. The tree was Ficus palmata, a close relative of the common fig (Ficus carica).

Until the early 1980s, a single tree was known in Israel in the Eilat Mountains, near the Egyptian border. It has since dried up and died, but remnants of this tree are kept as dried branches catalogued in the Hebrew University Herbarium. In 2010, when writing the “The Red Data Book: Endangered Plants of Israel” (Shmida, Pollak and Fragman-Sapir, 2011), we wrote that, to our regret, the tree was extinct in Israel. Happily, prior to publishing the book, another tree was discovered by Moti Shem-Tov and Dudi Rivner in Wadi Etek in the Eilat Mountains. The species’ status was changed. Later that year, yet another tree was found in that region, at an IDF base near the Egyptian border.

Ficus palmata is distributed from Egypt to Central Asia and is typical to the cold desert mountains of this area. In our region, large populations occur in the southern Sinai Mountains and in Edom in southern Jordan. The Eilat Mountains in Israel are located at the edge of the species’ distribution, and that is why the tree is scarce in our country.

www.botanic.co.il/en/knowledge/ficus-palmata-wild-fig/