Donald Culross Peattie - A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America: pp 287-288

PAWPAW [Papaw]

Asimina triloba (Linnaeus) Dunal

OTHER NAMES: Wild Banana. Custard Apple. Fetidshrub.

RANGE: From northern Florida to western New York State, the northern shores of Lake Ontario, southern Michigan and southwestern Iowa, and west to southeastern Nebraska, eastern parts of Kansas and Oklahoma and eastern Texas.

DESCRIPTION: Bark thin, dark brown, marked by large ash-colored blotches, covered by small, wart-like excrescences, and divided by long, shallow depressions. Twigs light brown tinged with red marked by narrow, shallow grooves. Winter buds 1/8 inch long, clothed with rusty brown hairs. Leaves 10 to 12 inches long and 4 to 6 broad, light green, paler below. Flowers nearly 2 inches across, pale green becoming brown, then maroon or purple. Fruit 3 to 5 inches long, becoming dark and wrinkled when ripe, with custardy flesh. Wood very light (25 pounds to the cubic foot, dry weight), soft, weak, spongy, and coarse-grained, with light greenish yellow heartwood and darker sapwood.

The first reference to this curious species of an otherwise notably tropical family occurs in the chronicles of DeSoto's expedition in the Mississippi valley in 1541, for naturally an edible fruit of such size was important to a host of conquistadores always near starvation. But, after that, for two centuries the Pawpaw flourished unknown save by wild animals and red men, until Mark Catesby delineated it in his Natural History of Carolina, that master work whose plates are fresh with wilderness still.

Once abundant in the Mississippi valley, where it formed dense thickets of wide extent, the Pawpaw is today in the northeastern states only a scattered understory tree, though to the south it may become 30 to 40 feet tall, with a straight trunk more than a foot in diameter. Everything about it is odd and unforgettable. The leaves are among the largest in our sylva, and in autumn, when they turn a butter yellow, they are the mellowest of the season's tones. The flowers, with their exotic look borrowed from tropical relatives, hardly seem to belong to the cool vernal world on which they open. At first green, the petals soon turn brown, and then they become a dark winy color, with an odor to match, a remembrance of fermenting purple grapes. As to the fruit, the better it grows, the uglier, for it is only when it is thoroughly mature, in late fall, that it is edible. At first the skin is greenish yellow; gradually it darkens, and when it is nearly black, wrinkled, and looks unappetizing - in October or November - at last the yellow or orange flesh is soft, custardy, and palatable

.
Pawpaws have had their enthusiasts from the days of the Creeks, Cheraws, and Catawbas, who often planted them, to the present. Such wood-wise people know that there are good and bad trees, as to flavor, and have long insisted that selection would soon result in marked improvement of the fruit; in general, the orange-fleshed variety is considered much more tasty. Pawpaws were made into a jelly by the early settlers, and still in southern towns sometimes appear in the markets. The seeds contain a powerful alkaloid which, it has been noted, has a stupefying effect on the brains of animals, yet opossums are great Pawpaw eaters, and raccoons and gray squirrels also appreciate the fruit.

For the wood there are no uses, but the inner bark was woven into fiber cloth by the Louisiana Indians, and the pioneers employed it for stringing fish. In its range a characteristic part of American country life, the Pawpaw, for all its exotic kinship, seems an intensely native tree, above all in the frosty autumn, when the leaves droop withering on the stem and the great plashy fruits hang preposterously heavy on the twigs.

Alan Davidson and Charlotte Knox - Fruit a Connoisseur's Guide and Cookbook: page 124

The PAPAW, the fruit of a small North American tree, Asimina triloba, is found as far north as New York State. It has for long been cultivated by Native Americans and whites alike. Its name is sometimes spelled "pawpaw," a corrupted name which is, confusingly, often also given to the completely different papaya. And it is yet another of the fruits which are referred to by the general name custard apple.

The papaw has a smooth, yellowish skin without the knobs or reticulations which are characteristic of its tropical relatives. The shape is slightly elongated and curved, and the average fruit is 4 inches long. The pulp, like that of other annonaceous fruits, is yellow, soft, and smooth. It has a rich, sweet, creamy flavor evocative of both the banana and the pear. All this is overlaid with a heavy fragrance, and some find the whole effect cloying. "Edible for boys" is one verdict. Papaw is usually eaten raw, but can be baked or made into various desserts.

Uncommon Fruits Worthy of Attention
A Gardener's Guide by
Lee Reich

Pawpaw: Banana of the North
BOTANICAL NAME Asimina triloba PLANT TYPE Small, pyramidal, deciduous tree POLLINATION
Except for a few cultivars, all need cross-pollination
RIPENING SEASON Late summer and early fall

I have three banana trees planted in the ground in my front yard, even though winter temperatures here reliably plummet well below zero. Okay, they are not bona fide bananas, but pawpaws; the fruits of which have been known as poor man's banana, Hoosier banana, Michigan banana, or "whatever-state-the-pawpaw-happens-to-grow-in" banana. The reason for these monikers is that pawpaw fruits taste and look very much like bananas. Within the pawpaw's greenish yellow skin, which becomes speckled and streaked with brown at ripeness, is a creamy white, custardy flesh. The flavor is much like that of bananas, but with additional hints of vanilla custard, pineapple, and mango.

And sich pop-paws!-Lumps o' raw Gold and green,-jes' oozy th'ough With ripe yaller-like you've saw Custard-pie with no crust to ...
(James Whitcomb Riley, "Up and Down Old Brandywine")

Aside from tropical flavor, the pawpaw also has tropical roots - botanical roots, that is. Pawpaw is a cold-hardy representative of the custard apple family (Annonaceae), which includes such tropical and subtropical delicacies as the soursop, the sweetsop, the cherimoya, and, of course, the custard apple. Even the name, pawpaw, is a nickname for yet another tropical fruit, the papaya, perhaps because of the slight physical resemblance between the two fruits. But the pawpaw and the papaya are as distantly related as are the apple and the orange.

Pawpaw trees are native throughout eastern United States, south of New England and north of Florida, and as far west as Nebraska. For centuries, American Indians collected and cultivated the fruits. Four hundred years ago a traveling companion of the explorer Hernando de Soto wrote that "the fruit is like unto peares riall: it hath verie good smell, and an excellent taste." Rural folk once knew and ate the fruit, and, according to Charles Sprague Sargent (the first director of Harvard's Arnold Arboretum), writing at the turn of this century, the fruit was "sold in large quantities in cities and towns in those parts of the country where the tree grows naturally." Four states: Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, and West Virginia-even have, towns named Paw Paw.

Description of the Plant

The pawpaw is a small, pyramidal tree with long, drooping leaves, the latter (once again) more reminiscent of tropical climes than those with frigid winters. The tree signals the coming of winter with its leaves changing color to a beautiful clear yellow.

Pawpaws grow wild in forests in the shade of larger trees. Pawpaws usually reach between ten and twenty-five feet in height, though individual specimens have been known to soar to almost fifty feet. Sprouts commonly shoot up from horizontal roots at some distance from the trunk, so a single tree eventually spreads to form a thicket. A family of sprouts with a single root system might cover a quarter of an acre. Sprouts from backyard trees are easily kept in check with a lawnmower.

The tree has some details worth a close look. In winter, the dormant buds are rusty brown and fuzzy. Those that are vegetative-these will give rise to shoots the forthcoming season-are long and pointed. Flower buds look like small plush buttons.

Come spring, those small, plush buttons swell and unfold petals that initially are green, then change to pink. When the flower finally opens to its full breadth, between 11/z and 2 inches across, the petals deepen in color to lurid purple. You have to get up close to appreciate the flowers fully, because of their dark color and because they hang downwards.

Pawpaw flowers are born singly, but each flower contains several separate ovaries so potentially can give rise to a cluster of fruits. Large clusters occur under only the best of conditions. Rarely is fruit set abundantly in the wild, because the flowers are not readily pollinated. One reason is that the female parts of the flower are no longer ready to receive pollen by the time the male parts get around to shedding it. And even when both female and male flower parts are ready, the flowers need cross-pollination to set fruit, yet few insects perform this job with efficiency or enthusiasm. It is not uncommon for less than one percent of the flowers on wild plants to set fruits mostly thanks to a few beetles and flies. Bees, the usual pollinators of fruit trees and bushes, show no interest in the pawpaws' dark, fetid flowers.

Fruits from a single flower hang together, pointing outward or upward-once again reminiscent of bananas, which hang from the banana plant much the same way in "hands." Fruits range from three to six inches long by one to three inches wide.

According to tradition, there are two distinct types of pawpaws: a large, yellow-fleshed, highly flavored, early ripening type; and a white-fleshed, mild-flavored, late ripening type. However, botanists do not distinguish these as separate types and the two probably represent extremes of a continuum in flesh color, with a tendency for the yellower-fleshed clones to taste better.

The fruits part company with bananas in that there are two rows of brown seeds the size of lima beans embedded in the pawpaw's creamy flesh. The fruit separates easily from the seeds, though.

I stood in thickets, turned your flat seeds with my tongue, and sucked the juices off those magic stones. (Norbert Krapf, "Paw Paw")

Over the past hundred years, there have been periodic flurries of interest in selecting and/or breeding superior pawpaws. In 1916 the American Genetic Association offered a prize of one hundred dollars as "stimulus to the search for superior specimens"-fifty dollars for the largest tree, and fifty dollars for the best fruit. Since the early part of the twentieth century, there have been a handful of enthusiasts who have put together collections of the best pawpaws available. Many of those collections have been threatened by or lost to neglect or development. (For example, the Beltway circling Washington, D.C., went right through the collection of David Fairchild.) There are efforts to save what is left of those collections and to develop or find even better pawpaws.

Since 1905, various pawpaw clones have been notable enough to receive names and, often, be propagated. Aside from those on the list at the end of this chapter, a few other cultivars are worth mentioning. `Gable', `Jumbo', 'Osborne', `Shannondale', and `Tiedke' were late ripening. `Hope's August' was an old variety distinguished for its early ripening, and 'Glaser' was notable for its large fruits. Other old varieties that should be mentioned for completeness include: 'Rees', `Cheely', 'Hann', `Early Best', `Arkansas Beauty', `Scott', 'Endicott', and `Hope's September'.
The Future of the Pawpaw?

Among wild pawpaws, it is not difficult to find ones that produce good fruits. But there is Uncommon Fruits Worthy of Attention room for improvement. The ideal pawpaw would produce abundant fruits that ripen before frost, be large, and have few and/or small seeds. This fruit would have a firm texture, and the flavor would be sweet, delicate, and rich but not cloying. If the fruit were ever to be grown commercially, it would need a thicker skin to tolerate shipping and handling.

Relatively little work has been done in improving the pawpaw. Most named varieties were superior wild plants found in a relatively narrow (given the pawpaw's extensive native range) geographic area. It could be that at this very moment the ideal or almost-ideal pawpaw is lurking somewhere in an American forest.
Some of the pawpaw's deficiencies could be overcome by hybridization with other members of the Asimina genus, to wit some of the Southern species, with which pawpaw readily crosses and which excel in complementary qualities. For example, A. parviflora is an upright shrub or small tree that is cold-hardy to the coastal plain of Virginia, is self-fruitful, and ripens its (barely) edible fruits weeks before the pawpaw. To make the flowers more attractive to insects, one might introduce some blood of the fragrant-flowered A. reticulata. Pawpaws might even be grown for their flowers as well as their fruits if they had the lovely, plate-sized flowers of A. obovata.

Delicious hybrids also might result from cross-breeding the pawpaw with some of its tropical and subtropical relatives, such as the cherimoya (Annona cherimola) and sugar apple (Annona squamosa).
Cultivation The pawpaw is an easy plant to grow. As might be expected of a plant with a wide natural range, the pawpaw is not finicky as to soil or climate. Any well-drained soil with a pH level ranging from 5.0 to 7.0 is suitable. A thick surface mulch of leaves or straw will reproduce the conditions found in pawpaw's native habitat. Though pawpaw trees are hardy to minus twenty or thirty degrees Fahrenheit, the fruit needs enough summer warmth and about 150 days to ripen (USDA Hardiness Zones 5 to 8). Therefore, pawpaws can be grown everywhere in temperate climates except extreme northern regions and areas with cool maritime summers.

Pruning is not necessary except perhaps to remove wayward branches here and there, more to please the gardener than the tree. Periodic pruning might be used to stimulate some new growth each year on old trees, for it is new wood that produces fruit the following season.

The pawpaw does have three foibles that require attention. First of all, care is needed in transplanting. Pawpaw has a long taproot that reaches deep into the ground, even on small plants, and the roots are brittle. One way around this shortcoming is to avoid transplanting: sow seeds at trees' permanent locations. Another way is to plant a tree that has spent its youth in a pot, so the roots are not disturbed during transplanting. Bare-root transplanting is possible, though. Wait until pawpaw buds begin to grow in the spring, then move the plant with as much of the root system as possible. Some nurseries dig and sell sprouts from pawpaw thickets; such plants, with their sparse root systems, rarely survive.

The second foible of the pawpaw concerns shade. Not only does the pawpaw feel at home in the shade, but young plants might actually prefer it. Many growers shade seedlings their first two or three years with an evergreen bough or a shingle stuck into the ground next to each plant. The response to sunlight is variable, though. Some seedlings thrive in full sun; others scorch. Differences probably depend on whether plants get enough water and on each plant's genetic makeup. After a few years, plants tolerate full sunlight. In contrast to many other fruiting plants such as apples and peaches, pawpaws can produce good crops with some (but not total) shade.

The third bugaboo in growing pawpaws, one not always requiring attention, is getting the plants to produce fruits in plants usually flower extravagantly and late enough to avoid spring frost, but it is pollination that limits yield. Most cultivars need cross-pollination.

If plants flower but bear little fruit, try hand-pollination. When the pollen is dusting off the anthers, pick off a flower and remove its petals. Then gently rub that flower onto the tip of the central stigma of several flowers of another plant (the stigmas are ready for the pollen when they look fresh and shiny). The central style is very delicate, and care must be taken not to break it. With hand-pollination, only the strength of the branches limits the quantity of fruit that a plant can produce.

Generally, no insects or diseases seem to find either the leaves or the fruits toothsome, so spraying is unnecessary. On the West Coast, however, pawpaw leaves are sometimes feasted upon by slugs and snails, and when they finish in early summer, other insects have been reported to eat the foliage and leave just a rattail midvein of each leaf. Elsewhere, possums, raccoons, and foxes are the only competitors for the fruit.

Propagation

The easiest way to get pawpaw trees started is to plant seeds. The seeds germinate readily but patience is needed, not so much in waiting for the plants to fruit, but in watching the slow germination and initial growth. Before germination can occur, the seeds need cold stratification for between ninety and 120 days. About thirty days after the stratified seed is sown, the root emerges and grows downwards. Thirty days after root emergence, the shoot appears aboveground. Seedling growth is very slow-measured in inches the first two, even three, years. But then the pace picks up and the plant begins to bear when it is five to seven years old, at which time the tree is five feet tall or more.

Sow the seeds either outdoors in hills at their permanent locations (and thin the seedlings to the one or two most vigorous plants per hill after a couple of years), or in containers. The containers need not be wide, but must be deep enough to accommodate the taproot: a twelve-inch length of PVC pipe with a screen at the bottom suffices. Seedlings planted outdoors usually do not emerge until about July, sometimes not until the following spring. If seeds are sown early in the season in a greenhouse, it is possible for plants to make the equivalent of two seasons of growth by the end of their first summer. The seeds must not be sown too early, however, for they are responsive to day length, and seedlings that poke through the ground while days are still short act as if fall is approaching and stop growing. At the latitude of Maryland, February is the best time for indoor sowing.

Pawpaw cultivars are easily propagated by most types of grafting. Keep scionwood dormant in a refrigerator and graft just as the leaf buds on the rootstock begin to show green in the spring.
Other methods for propagating pawpaws include transplanting suckers and taking root cuttings. Pawpaws will grow from transplanted suckers as long as the suckers are severed from the mother plant with a shovel, but left in place, a year before transplanting. Success in growing plants from root cuttings is variable, dependent on the particular clone. The advantage of root cuttings and suckers is that the clones are on their own roots. If a plant dies back or sends up root suckers, all new growth still will be of the desired clone.

Harvest and Use

A good-yielding pawpaw tree produces between twenty-five and fifty pounds of fruit, or about a bushel. Some people harvest pawpaws when they are dead ripe on the tree, at which time the greenish yellow skin turns brown or almost black. Other people pick fruits when they just begin to soften, to finish ripening indoors (acting like a banana again, isn't it?). Perhaps the fully ripe flavor is too strong for some people.

Large fruits fall when almost ripe, which is another good reason for a thick, soft mulch beneath the trees.
Fully ripe fruit does not store very well, but, if picked firm ripe and refrigerated, the fruit may keep for several months. Pawpaw pulp also can be dried for storage.

The way to eat a fresh pawpaw is by halving it and using a spoon, or by removing the skin a la banana, though the latter method is not quite that easy. Pawpaws do not take kindly to cooking, as their flavor is fugitive and easily driven away by any more than a little heat. Within this constraint, the pawpaw still can be used to make a tasty pudding, marmalade, beer, brandy, and, of course, custard pie.

Cultivars

NOTE: Many of the cultivars mentioned below may not be available or even exist anymore.
'Buckman': fruit is late-ripening, white-fleshed, and has a mild flavor. 'Davis': fruit is late-ripening, large, with a green skin when ripe; originated probably in 1960s, but has been superseded by better cultivars, such as `Overleese'.
`Fairchild': productive tree with early-ripening fruit; a seedling of `Ketter', considered by Dr. G. A. Zimmerman (a pawpaw enthusiast whose collection spanned the years between 1917 and 1941) to be the best cultivar.
`Ketter': the winner of the American Genetic Society's pawpaw contest in 1916 for the best fruit; early-ripening; considered the second best pawpaw by Dr. Zimmerman.
`Martin': late-ripening and cold-resistant, but the fruit is small and has poor flavor.
`Mitchell': large, oval-to-round fruits with excellent flavor, comparable to or better than `Overleese'.
`Overleese': a late-ripening variety similar to 'Davis'; the oval-toround fruits have large seeds but excellent flavor and are borne in clusters of three to six fruits.
`Sunflower': a self-fertile pawpaw with fruit that ripens late, has few seeds, and weighs about half a pound; the flavor is reported by some as excellent and by others as mediocre.
`Sweet Alice': a variety reputedly prolific, with large fruits of good flavor.
`Taylor' (`Taylor l'): similar to 'Davis' in ripening, color, and size, but has better flavor and is self-fertile.
`Taylor 2' (`TayTwo'): late-ripening, medium-sized, excellent flavor, light green when ripe; has been reported by some as a shy and by others as a prolific bearer.
`Uncle Tom': the first-named cultivar of pawpaw, from the turn of this century.

*excerpts used without permission.