Edibles: Wonderful new book takes the (fruit) cake

Is there a gardener or naturalist on your holiday gift list? If so, I know of a new book that most gardeners would love to get their hands on. It's "Fruit: Edible, Inedible, Incredible."

This is not a how-to book; rather it's a how and why book. It combines more than 200 exquisite photographs of fruit with an academically rigorous, yet reader-friendly text that focuses on fruit classification and fruits' role in the dispersal of seeds.

From the jacket cover's image of a strawberry -- "stitched together" from 40 separate frames shot with a scanning electron microscope -- to a carrot fruit bristling with spines, Rob Kesseler's digital photographs are extraordinary. Every hair, scale and targeted structure is crystal-clear. And what architecture is revealed in those fruit forms! Simply as art, the book could stand alone.

But the reader is in luck. Those marvelous photographs accompany a fascinating text. Granted, author Wolfgang Stuppy uses botanical terminology; it's impossible to write about complex fruit structures without resorting to scientific language. However, the bulk of the text is in layman's language. There are even bits of humor peppered throughout.

As he guides readers through fruit classification, Stuppy explains why raspberries aren't really berries, and why citrus fruits and pumpkins are. We learn how the structure of a coconut fruit enables it to float in saltwater for months and travel thousands of miles to perhaps colonize a new area. And the author recounts how politics influences science, citing an 1893 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the tomato, for purposes of revenue at least, was a vegetable. At the time, imported fruits were exempt from tax; imported vegetables weren't.

A substantial portion of the book deals with the ingenious ways that plants have evolved to accomplish the all-important dispersal of seed. We're familiar with some: the hitchhiking employed by cockleburs, the allure of food offered by holly fruits to attract birds which later excrete undigested seeds in new locations, and the windsurfing utilized by dandelion heads, double-winged maple fruits and other drifters.

What most of us know about seed dispersal though, is paltry. Some fruits launch seeds by springing open. Parachute and double-wing are just a few among many forms of airborne fruits. And animal transport isn't limited to fruit-eating birds and animals bestuck with burs. Ants move fruits. So do aardvarks, bats, monkeys and elephants.

The aardvark's is an interesting story, so we'll conclude with it. For more, you'll need to get the book.

In the dry part of southern Africa, where aardvarks feed most of the year on ants and termites, there's a plant called the aardvark cucumber. It ripens its water-filled fruits underground. In the driest part of the year, when it's dangerous for aardvarks to turn up at water holes, the critters smell out the cucumbers, dig them up with stout claws and eat them -- seeds and all.

Returning the favor, aardvarks bury their seed-filled dung, thereby distributing the plant. It's an atypical example of risky co-dependence; each partner may be the sole guarantor of the other's survival.