Introduction of Rose Gold by Eric Durtschi:

I previously posted about this as Bath St. Seedling. After having spent a little time with this and consulting with my 8 year old daughter, Rosalie, we have come up with a name. (She asked to be able to name the next fig as her birthday present. 😄) Together, we decided on Rose Gold as it is descriptive and she loves that it is named after her.

This is growing out of the base of the stump of an old royal palm tree. It is growing right beside a busy road and it is tricky to get to without getting run over!!

The figs are small and dark with little hairs, similar to several seedlings I have found with some palmata parentage. They have the most peculiar ripening pattern. The bottom half is blood red while the top is amber/gold. The flavor of the bottom is strawberry and tart raspberry while the top is like a sweet fig and pear smoothie. Really interesting.

I suspected that the bottom was caprified while the top was not so I gathered a bunch more today and opened them all up to experiment on this and to try and find out why the top does not get caprified. I could not find out why but I did confirm that this is actually the case.

I cut the bottom away from the top and placed the seeds in 2 separate cups. The ones from the bottom sank and the ones from the top floated. I guess that means this could be a common fig? If so, I am curious what it will look like. I would imagine it would all be amber/gold. I have no idea why the top is not reached by the wasp. It didn’t seem to be any more dense than others that I have opened at the unripe stage so the flowers must be shaped different from the bottom.

If you have seen this before or have insight into why this happens, I would love to hear why.

I will be giving away cuttings tomorrow to some of the lucky people at the fig sale and I will make sure that some get out to people without the wasp so we can see how this does without caprification.