The Year of the Brooklyn Fig

The New York Times offers further proof that nature still lives in New York. The beautiful cats, birds and butterflies may have already tipped you off to that fact.

I’ve had the tree for 15 years, but when the figs arrive, it still seems like a miracle. As a lifelong New Yorker, harvesting fruit off my own tree wasn’t something I expected would become a late-summer rite.

But it has, and there is nothing that compares to that simple pleasure of pulling a piece of soft purple fruit off a tree branch in my own backyard, especially when the backyard is only a stone’s throw from the chaos of Flatbush Avenue. Although I can still hear delivery trucks idling, sirens shrieking and cars honking, the fig tree makes me feel at least momentarily connected to the earth.

As noted in the article and by gardeners throughout the neighborhood, fig trees thriving in Brooklyn is part of a tradition that stretches back to Italian immigrants at the turn of the 20th century.

In the last 20 years, figs have been doing particularly well. Today, they are thriving.

This has been a particularly good year for Brooklyn figs. In Park Slope, Cynthia Lindberg is “drowning in figs,” she said. She planted her tree in 1997, the same year I did, saying it reminded her of her grandmothers’ gardens in North Carolina. Her harvest is large enough to give figs to her neighbors, and still have plenty to make into jam.

How is your fig tree doing?

Photo:  Nelson Ryland, Flatbush Fig Farm