Photo: KENPEI — CC BY-SA 3.0 · source
Survives zone 7 through 9
Harvest calendar
Ripens: Breba early summer + main crop late summer
Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.
A cold-hardier East Asian wild fig bearing small, deep purple-blue figs dusted with a whitish bloom — edible fresh though noticeably smaller and less sweet than common fig, and more often grown for hardiness or ornamental interest than for a heavy edible crop.
- Hardiness
- Zone 7–9
- Habit
- Tree
- Edible part
- Fruit
- Ripens
- Breba early summer + main crop late summer
- Mature size
- Shrub or small tree 2–5 m; excellent in a container
- Light
- Full sun to partial
- Soil pH
- 6.0–7.5 (lime-tolerant)
- Environment
- Temperate
- Native range
- Native to Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, and Okinawa, typically as an understory shrub or small tree in temperate forest.
- Status
- Wild
- Years to fruit
- 1–2 yrs
- Growth speed
- Slow to moderate
- Spacing
- 200 cm (79 in) apart — about 4 m² (43 sq ft) per plant
- Leaf shape
- Narrow oval to elliptic leaves with a slightly heart-shaped or rounded base, thin-textured and smooth to slightly hairy, smaller than the leaves of F. carica.
- Root system
- Fibrous fig-type root system; more compact and less vigorous than F. carica, doing well in containers.
- Fruit description
- Small figs about 1–1.3 cm across, ripening from green through orange to a deep purple-blue with a powdery, glaucous bloom; softer and less sweet than F. carica, with more seeds.
- Propagation
- By hardwood or softwood cuttings and by air layering, following standard fig propagation methods; seed propagation is rarely used outside of breeding work.
- Pollination
- Common-type figs PARTHENOCARPIC — no pollination needed
The edible parts listed above are a starting point, not a field guide. Identify a plant with certainty — ideally against a local authority — before eating any part of it, and read the full disclaimer. Spotted something wrong? Report it.
Growing guide
How it spreads. A clump-forming shrub or small tree that does not sucker aggressively or naturalize as a garden weed in cultivation; regenerates from the base if damaged by cold.
Growing tips. Noticeably more cold-tolerant than F. carica, reliably hardy in zones 7–9 with reports of surviving briefer freezes further north when given a sheltered site. Dioecious like most wild figs, pollinated in its native range by the specialist wasp Blastophaga nipponica — outside that range, without the wasp, fruit will not develop viable seed, though some parthenocarpic set can still occur on female plants. Prune to control size, as it can be kept shrubby with regular cutting back.
Grow journal
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