All fruits

Abiu

A smooth, bright-yellow Amazonian fruit with clear, jelly-like flesh that tastes of caramel-vanilla custard — one of the gentlest and sweetest of the sapote family.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Acai

A small, dark-purple palm berry from the Amazon floodplains — earthy, low-sugar, and famously antioxidant-rich, blended into the thick frozen bowls that made it a global health food.

Berry Year-round

Acerola

A small, bright-red cherry-lookalike from the tropical Americas that packs one of the highest vitamin C concentrations of any fruit — the reason it fills supplement bottles worldwide.

Berry Summer Autumn

Achacha

A bright-orange Amazonian relative of the mangosteen from Bolivia, with a thin leathery skin around tangy-sweet white flesh that tastes of lemonade and honey. Now grown commercially in Australia, which gave it the name achacha.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Ackee

Jamaica's national fruit — soft, buttery yellow arils that cook up like scrambled eggs, from a fruit that is genuinely dangerous unless harvested and prepared exactly right.

Tropical & subtropical Winter Summer

Acorn squash

The ribbed, acorn-shaped winter squash built for halving and roasting — deeply grooved skin that defeats a peeler, and a cavity that was clearly designed to hold butter and maple syrup.

Melon Autumn Winter

African black plum

A sweet, blue-black African fruit from a savanna tree — soft, date-like flesh tasting of prune and chocolate, eaten fresh, dried, and cooked into a molasses-like sweetener. A valued wild food and medicine across West and Central Africa.

Tropical & subtropical Spring Summer

African breadfruit

A massive, spiky green fruit-head from West and Central Africa whose flesh is discarded — the treasure is the many seeds inside, boiled or roasted into a protein-rich staple dish, ukwa, beloved across Igbo Nigeria.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

African locust bean

A West African tree whose long pods hold two treasures — a sweet, yellow, powdery pulp eaten fresh or in drinks, and seeds fermented into dawadawa, the pungent, protein-rich condiment that seasons much of West African cooking.

Tropical & subtropical Spring Summer

African mango

A West and Central African forest fruit that looks and eats like a fibrous mango — but its real treasure is the seed, ground into ogbono, the beloved soup-thickener of Nigerian and Cameroonian kitchens.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

African star apple

West Africa's dry-season obsession — the orange fruit Nigerians know as agbalumo or udara, sweet-sharp with a skin you chew like gum. When harmattan winds blow, its street price is a national conversation.

Tropical & subtropical Winter Spring

Akebi

A purple sausage-shaped pod that splits open on its own when ripe, revealing translucent, mild-sweet pulp studded with black seeds. A nostalgic wild-forage fruit of northern Japan — and the rare case where the bitter rind is the real delicacy.

Berry Autumn

Ambarella

A crunchy tropical fruit with pineapple-mango tartness — eaten green and sour with salt, or ripe and sweet — hiding a spiky fibrous pit at its core.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

American persimmon

A small, wild North American persimmon that is mouth-puckeringly astringent until it's dead-ripe and soft — then turns into one of the sweetest fruits on the continent, tasting of dates, caramel, and brown sugar. The base of Midwestern persimmon pudding.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn

American plum

A small, wild red-to-yellow plum native across North America — tart-skinned and sweet-fleshed, thriving in thickets and prairies where it fed Indigenous peoples and settlers alike. Too tart-skinned for many raw, but the maker of superb wild-plum jelly.

Stone fruit Summer Autumn

Amla

The translucent green fruit at the heart of Ayurveda — so sour and astringent it makes water taste sweet afterward, and packed with unusually heat-stable vitamin C. India eats it pickled, candied, juiced, and as daily medicine.

Berry Autumn Winter

Apple

The world's most cultivated temperate fruit — crisp, sweet-tart, endlessly varied across 7,500+ cultivars, and the keeper of the cold-storage crown that puts it on shelves year-round.

Pome Autumn Year-round

Apricot

The golden miniature of the stone-fruit family — musky, honeyed, and tragically fragile fresh, which is why the world knows it best dried. Central Asia's ancient orchard treasure.

Stone fruit Summer Spring

Araçá

A wild Brazilian guava with a strawberry twist — small red or yellow fruit whose sweet-tart, aromatic pulp tastes of guava crossed with berries. Adored in southern Brazil's backyards and juice bars, and infamous elsewhere as an invasive escape artist.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Araticum

The custard-apple of Brazil's cerrado savanna — a large, rugged brown fruit with intensely sweet, aromatic yellow flesh. Strongly flavored and much loved in Minas Gerais, where marolo sweets and liqueurs celebrate the harvest.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Aratiles

The small red berry that falls from scruffy roadside trees across the tropics and tastes improbably of cotton candy. Beloved by children in the Philippines and Latin America, almost never sold, and one of the fastest-growing fruit trees on earth.

Berry Year-round

Arazá

A large, fragrant, intensely sour yellow fruit of the western Amazon — too acidic to eat raw but transcendent as juice, ice cream, and jam. A Myrtaceae cousin of guava with a heady tropical perfume.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Aronia

The berry that makes you pucker on purpose — America's native chokeberry, adopted at industrial scale by Poland, holds some of the highest polyphenol readings ever measured in fruit. Undrinkable straight, indispensable blended.

Berry Autumn

Asam gelugur

A large, ribbed, sour green-to-yellow fruit of the mangosteen family, grown in Malaysia and Thailand almost entirely to be sliced and sun-dried into a tangy souring agent — the tamarind of the Malay kitchen, giving fish curries their bright acidity.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Ash gourd

A giant, pale-green gourd coated in a chalky white wax that lets it keep for months — mild and cooling, made into winter-melon soup across East Asia and the translucent candy petha in India. A cucurbit valued as much for medicine and keeping as for flavor.

Melon Autumn Winter

Asian pear

The round, crisp, ultra-juicy pear of East Asia — eaten firm like an apple rather than soft like a European pear, refreshingly sweet and used as much for cooking and gifting as for snacking.

Pome Autumn

Atemoya

The engineered love-child of sugar-apple and cherimoya — created in Florida in 1908 and perfected in Taiwan and Australia. Custard-sweet with a pineapple tang, fewer seeds, and a hardier disposition than either famous parent.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Autumn olive

A speckled red berry from a hardy East Asian shrub — sweet-tart, juicy, and extraordinarily rich in lycopene — that has become one of North America's most notorious invasive plants, making it a guilt-free forage the more you pick.

Berry Autumn

Avocado

The fruit that thinks it's a fat — buttery, savory, and unique in the plant kingdom for its oil-rich flesh. Botanically a single-seeded berry; culturally, toast's best friend and guacamole's soul.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round Summer

Azarole

A Mediterranean hawthorn bearing unusually large, apple-scented haws — sweet-tart little fruits eaten fresh or made into jam and jelly from Spain to the Levant, an old orchard fruit now grown mostly in gardens.

Pome Autumn

Babaco

A seedless, five-sided golden fruit from the Ecuadorian highlands — a natural papaya-family hybrid tasting of pineapple, strawberry, and papaya, with skin you can eat and flesh light enough to earn it the nickname "champagne fruit."

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Bacaba

A tall Amazonian palm whose purple-black fruit yields a rich, oily, chocolate-brown drink — "bacaba wine" — much like açaí but milder and creamier. A cherished staple of the Brazilian Amazon, drunk sweetened with sugar and cassava flour.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Bacuri

One of the Amazon's most prized flavors — a thick-skinned fruit whose fragrant, sweet-tart white pulp becomes some of Brazil's greatest ice cream and mousse. A relative of mangosteen, so loved in Pará that the pulp is priced like a delicacy.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Bael

A sacred Indian fruit in a hard woody shell, hiding aromatic orange pulp that makes a legendary cooling summer drink — one of the oldest medicinal fruits of the subcontinent, tied to the god Shiva.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Banana

The world's most-eaten fruit — a portable, potassium-rich energy bar that grows on a giant herb, not a tree. The Philippines' Lakatan and Saba varieties go far beyond the supermarket Cavendish.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Banana passionfruit

An elongated, banana-shaped yellow passionfruit from the Andes — soft orange pulp that's sweet-tart and intensely aromatic, the base of Colombia's beloved curuba juice and sorbets. A high-altitude vine, and a notorious invader of Pacific islands.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Baobab

The upside-down tree's velvet pod holds a fruit that dries itself — naturally powdery, sherbet-tart pulp that Africa has stirred into drinks for centuries and food science calls one of the most nutrient-dense fruits measured.

Tropical & subtropical Winter Spring

Barberry

Tiny, jewel-red, intensely sour berries — the zereshk that studs Persian rice with bright, tangy sparks. A traditional European hedge fruit turned Iranian kitchen staple, usually dried.

Berry Autumn

Beach plum

A hardy wild plum of the North Atlantic dunes — small, tart, and purple-blue, thriving in sand and salt spray where little else fruits. The prized base of Cape Cod and New England beach-plum jelly.

Stone fruit Summer Autumn

Bell pepper

The chilli that forgot to be hot — a genetic quirk switched off its capsaicin, leaving a sweet, crunchy berry that is one of the richest common sources of vitamin C on earth, well ahead of any orange.

Berry Summer Autumn

Ber

The Indian jujube — a small, crisp, apple-like fruit that ripens through the hot dry season across South Asia and Africa, eaten fresh with salt and chili, dried, or candied. A hardy desert tree fruit beloved from India to the Sahel.

Tropical & subtropical Winter Spring

Bergamot orange

The aromatic sour citrus of Calabria whose rind oil gives Earl Grey tea its scent and classic perfumery its heart note. Too sour and bitter to eat, it lives almost entirely as fragrance and flavoring.

Citrus Winter

Bignay

Long grape-like clusters of tiny berries that ripen unevenly from green to red to near-black — sour to sweet-tart on one string — famous across the Philippines as a wine and jam fruit.

Berry Summer Autumn

Bilberry

Europe's small, dark wild blueberry — more intense and tart than the cultivated kind, and stained purple all the way through. A laborious hand-picked forage fruit famous for eye-health folklore and deep-purple pies.

Berry Summer

Bilimbi

The starfruit's ferociously sour cousin — small, crisp green fruits so acidic they are used almost entirely as a souring agent, the tart heart of Filipino sinigang and countless pickles.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round Summer

Binjai

A large, fragrant wild mango of Borneo and Sumatra with soft, pale, juicy flesh — sweeter and less fibrous than most wild mangoes in its best forms, eaten fresh or pounded into fiery sambals across the Malay world.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Bird cherry

A tiny, dark, bittersweet wild cherry of northern Europe and Asia — too astringent to eat by the handful, but dried and ground (seeds and all) into a fragrant, almond-scented flour that flavors Russia's famous cheremukha cakes.

Stone fruit Summer

Biriba

An Amazonian custard-apple cousin whose soft, spiny yellow skin hides white flesh that tastes uncannily of lemon meringue pie — one of the sweetest, most delicate fruits of the tropics, and one of the most fragile.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Bitter kola

A West African seed chewed for its long bitter burn — nothing to do with true kola nut despite the name, and a fixture of Nigerian hospitality, ceremony and market stalls from Lagos to Douala.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Bitter melon

A warty green gourd famous for being the most bitter of all cultivated fruits — a staple vegetable-fruit across Asia and the Caribbean, cooked to tame its edge, and one of the most studied traditional foods for blood sugar.

Melon Summer

Black raspberry

A distinct North American berry often mistaken for a blackberry — but it pops off its core hollow like a raspberry, and packs one of the highest antioxidant loads of any fruit, with a rich, seedy, wine-like flavor.

Berry Summer

Black sapote

A green tomato-shaped persimmon relative whose ripe flesh turns glossy black and tastes uncannily like sweet chocolate pudding — a natural dessert with almost no fat.

Tropical & subtropical Winter Autumn

Blackberry

The hedgerow's free dessert — glossy, wine-dark aggregate berries that carry their core with them, deeper and more tannic than raspberries, and the anchor of crumbles and bramble jelly.

Berry Summer Autumn

Blackcurrant

Europe's intense purple powerhouse — too tart and musky to snack raw, unbeatable as cordial, jam, and crème de cassis, with vitamin C levels that made it wartime Britain's citrus substitute.

Berry Summer

Blood orange

A sweet orange whose flesh flushes crimson to near-black when cold nights trigger anthocyanin pigments. Sicily's most celebrated citrus, prized for a berry-edged flavor and a color no ordinary orange can match.

Citrus Winter

Blue quandong

A startlingly bright-blue rainforest fruit from eastern Australia and the tropics — thin, tart-mild flesh over a large, intricately sculptured seed. A traditional Aboriginal food and cassowary favorite, more famous for its electric-blue color and its bead-like stones than its modest flavor.

Berry Autumn Winter

Blueberry

North America's berry gift to the world — sweet-mild, snackable, and the poster child of antioxidant research. Wild lowbush berries are tiny, intense, and worth the hunt.

Berry Summer

Bolwarra

A small, urn-shaped green fruit of an ancient Australian rainforest shrub — sweet, aromatic, and jelly-fleshed, tasting of guava and pear with a spicy note. A traditional Aboriginal food and a native bush-food flavoring, from one of the most primitive flowering-plant families on earth.

Berry Summer Autumn

Bottle gourd

Possibly the first plant humans ever domesticated — grown not for food but for the watertight container its dried shell makes. Eaten young it is one of the lightest vegetables there is; left to mature it becomes a bottle, a bowl or a sitar.

Melon Summer Autumn

Boysenberry

A big, wine-dark bramble berry — a tangled hybrid of blackberry, raspberry, dewberry, and loganberry — famous for the pie that saved Knott's Berry Farm, and grown today mostly in New Zealand.

Berry Summer

Breadfruit

The starch that grows on trees — a football of creamy, potato-like flesh that fed Polynesian voyages and sparked the mutiny on the Bounty. Roasted, it earns the name; fried, it beats the potato at its own game.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Year-round

Breadnut

The seeded, wild ancestor of the breadfruit — a spiny green globe packed with chestnut-like seeds that are boiled or roasted across the Caribbean and Pacific. Grown for its nutritious nuts rather than its starchy flesh.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Buddha's hand

A citron that grows in eerie finger-like segments, all fragrant rind and pith with almost no flesh or juice — grown for its powerful perfume, its zest, and its role as a ceremonial offering.

Citrus Winter Autumn

Buffaloberry

A tart, translucent-red berry of the North American plains and prairies — a hardy, nitrogen-fixing shrub whose sharp fruit sweetens after frost into jellies and sauces, and whose foaming relatives make the traditional "Indian ice cream."

Berry Summer Autumn

Bullock's heart

The heart-shaped, red-blushed member of the custard-apple clan — smooth-skinned and netted, with soft, creamy, mildly sweet flesh. Less perfumed than its cousins but widely grown from India to the Caribbean as an easygoing dooryard dessert.

Tropical & subtropical Winter Spring

Burdekin plum

A flattened, purple-black Australian fruit that must be stored to soften before it's edible — then reveals tart-sweet, wine-dark flesh around a distinctive sculptured seed. A traditional Aboriginal food of the northern rainforests, made into jams and country wine.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Buriti

The scaly red fruit of the towering moriche palm, one of the Amazon's most important wild foods — orange, oily flesh spectacularly rich in beta-carotene, eaten as sweets, drinks, and (as aguaje) a Peruvian street staple with a devoted following.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Burmese grape

Not a grape at all but a trunk-fruiting relative of rambai — clusters of pink-to-crimson berries whose translucent white segments taste sweet-sour like a mild mangosteen. A monsoon treat from Assam to the Mekong, rarely seen beyond it.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Bush tomato

A small desert fruit of central Australia that dries to a raisin right on the bush — intensely savory-sweet with caramel, tomato, and tamarillo notes. A cornerstone Aboriginal food, ground into a spice (akudjura) that's now a star of native Australian cooking.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Butternut squash

The sweetest and most reliable of the winter squashes — a pale tan, bell-shaped fruit with dense orange flesh, a small seed cavity and a keeping life measured in months. Bred in Massachusetts in the 1940s and now the default cooking squash worldwide.

Melon Autumn Winter

Button mangosteen

A small, flattened orange fruit like a miniature mangosteen — thin-skinned and easy to open, with sweet-sour segments tasting of tangy marmalade. A rare Malaysian dooryard fruit and one of the mangosteen family's most approachable members.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Cacao

The pod behind chocolate — but its fresh white pulp is a delicious fruit in its own right, sweet-tart and floral, sucked from the beans across the tropics. The seeds, fermented and roasted, become cocoa; the fruit around them is the tropics' best-kept secret.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Calafate

A small, dark blue-purple berry of Patagonia — sweet-tart and richly flavored, gathered from thorny shrubs across the windswept south. Made into jams, ice cream, and pisco sours, and wrapped in the legend that whoever eats it will return to Patagonia.

Berry Summer Autumn

Calamansi

The Philippines' tiny, mighty citrus — a kumquat-lime hybrid the size of a ping-pong ball whose fragrant, complex sourness seasons everything from pancit to iced tea.

Citrus Year-round

Cambuci

A green, flattened, flying-saucer-shaped fruit of Brazil's Atlantic forest — intensely sour and wildly aromatic, almost never eaten raw but transformed into some of São Paulo's most prized artisan juices, sorbets, and caipirinhas.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Camu camu

A cherry-sized berry harvested by canoe from flooded Amazon riverbanks, holding some of the highest vitamin C ever measured in fresh fruit — routinely 50 times an orange. Too sour to snack on, unforgettable as juice.

Berry Summer

Canary melon

A striking bright-yellow, oval winter melon with smooth waxy skin and pale, faintly tangy flesh that tastes a little like a sweeter, softer pear. A long-keeping Mediterranean melon prized as much for its vivid color as its mild sweetness.

Melon Summer Autumn

Canistel

The "egg fruit" — bright yellow-orange flesh with the dense, dry, crumbly texture of hard-boiled egg yolk and a sweet custard-and-sweet-potato flavor.

Tropical & subtropical Winter Autumn

Cantaloupe

The perfumed melon — netted skin, sunset-orange flesh, and a musky sweetness that gave "muskmelon" its name. At peak, it out-aromatizes nearly every fruit in the market; the smell test never lies.

Melon Summer

Cape gooseberry

A golden marble in a papery lantern husk — sweet-tart and tomatoey-tropical, eaten fresh as a fancy garnish, dried like a raisin, or cooked into jams across the Andes and beyond.

Berry Summer Autumn

Caper berry

The fruit of the Mediterranean caper bush — an olive-sized, seedy green berry, tangy and briny when pickled, on long stalks. The larger cousin of the caper (which is the pickled flower bud), and a piquant, mustardy garnish across Mediterranean cooking.

Berry Summer

Capulí

The Andean black cherry — small, dark, and sweet with a faintly almond-bitter finish, borne on a highland form of the American black cherry. A cherished dooryard fruit from Mexico through the Andes, eaten fresh and in drinks.

Stone fruit Summer Autumn

Carob

The long brown pod of a Mediterranean tree whose sweet, roasted pulp became the world's best-known chocolate substitute — naturally sweet, caffeine-free, and ancient, with seeds so uniform they gave us the "carat."

Tropical & subtropical Autumn

Casaba melon

A wrinkled, golden, teardrop-shaped winter melon with pale, mild, cucumber-sweet flesh and — unusually — almost no aroma. A long-keeping melon from Anatolia that ripens late and stores into winter, when other melons are long gone.

Melon Autumn

Cashew apple

The juicy, bell-shaped "fruit" the cashew nut dangles beneath — technically a swollen stem, gloriously fragrant, and so fragile that most of the world's crop is drunk within miles of the tree. Brazil turns it into juice; Goa distills it into feni.

Tropical & subtropical Spring Summer

Cempedak

A smaller, softer, more intense jackfruit relative from Southeast Asia — deep golden segments with a durian-like richness and heady aroma, often battered and deep-fried whole.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Ceylon gooseberry

A small, velvety, deep-purple fruit from Sri Lanka and southern India — intensely sour and juicy, staining a vivid crimson, and made into some of the most brilliantly colored jams and drinks of the tropics. A close relative of the kei apple.

Berry Summer Autumn

Charichuelo

A ridged, warty yellow fruit of the Amazon and northern South America — a mangosteen relative whose translucent white pulp is sweet-tart and refreshing, tasting of citrus and lychee. A cherished dooryard fruit of Colombia and Peru, little known beyond.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Chayote

A pale-green, pear-shaped, wrinkled gourd from Mesoamerica — crisp, mild, and endlessly versatile, eaten as a fruit-vegetable across Latin America, Asia, and beyond. Its whole plant is edible, from the single soft seed to the shoots and starchy roots.

Melon Autumn Winter

Che

A knobbly red aggregate fruit from a thorny East Asian tree, tasting like a cross between watermelon, fig, and mulberry. A close mulberry cousin that ripens one fruit at a time deep into autumn — sweet, seedy, and almost unknown outside collectors' orchards.

Berry Autumn

Chequers

The small, russet-brown, speckled fruit of the wild service tree — hard and sour until bletted soft, then sweet, date-like, and spiced. A near-forgotten English hedgerow fruit once so beloved it named countless "Chequers" pubs.

Pome Autumn

Cherimoya

The Andean custard apple Mark Twain called "deliciousness itself" — green scaled skin over silky white flesh tasting of banana, pineapple, and vanilla custard.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Cherry

The fleeting jewel of early summer — glossy, snappy, and gone in weeks. Sweet cherries for the bowl, sour cherries for the pie, and a blossom season that stops whole nations to look up.

Stone fruit Summer Spring

Cherry plum

One of the earliest plums of the year — small, round, cherry-sized fruit in red or gold that ripens in early summer. A hedgerow and street-tree fruit across Europe and Central Asia, sweet-tart and best for jam and eating fresh.

Stone fruit Summer

Chili pepper

The fruit that fights back — chilli's heat comes from capsaicin, a compound the plant evolved to deter mammals while letting birds spread its seeds. Humans, uniquely, decided the pain was the point.

Berry Summer Autumn

Chinese quince

A large, hard, intensely fragrant yellow fruit from East Asia — too woody and astringent to eat raw, but its powerful perfume scents rooms, its slices sweeten honeyed teas, and it's a classic remedy for coughs and sore throats.

Pome Autumn

Chinotto

A small, intensely bitter orange from the Italian Riviera — inedible raw, but the defining flavor of Italy's beloved dark chinotto soft drink, and a prized candied fruit. A compact ornamental citrus grown mainly for bitterness and aroma.

Citrus Winter

Chironji

The tiny lens-shaped kernel prised from a small forest drupe — India's answer to the almond, scattered through kheer, barfi and festival sweets, and gathered almost entirely from wild trees by forest communities.

Tropical & subtropical Spring Summer

Chokecherry

A wild North American cherry that grows in dense red-to-black clusters — astringent enough to "choke," but a cornerstone of Indigenous Plains food as syrup, jelly, and dried in pemmican and wojapi.

Stone fruit Summer Autumn

Chupa-chupa

A large Amazonian fruit in the cacao family whose brown-green rind peels to reveal sweet, fibrous, deep-orange flesh you suck off the seeds — a pumpkin-and-apricot flavor sold along the rivers of Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Citron

One of the three ancestral citrus, grown almost entirely for its thick fragrant rind rather than juice. Candied into succade, blessed at the Jewish festival of Sukkot, and prized around the Mediterranean for perfume more than flesh.

Citrus Autumn Winter

Clementine

The small, glossy, seedless mandarin hybrid that defines winter citrus in Europe and North America — sweeter and firmer-skinned than a satsuma, and sold by the crate through the holidays.

Citrus Autumn Winter

Cloudberry

The amber gold of the Arctic bog — a rare, hard-to-cultivate raspberry relative whose ripe berries glow like honeyed pearls and taste of baked apple, tart yogurt, and wildflower.

Berry Summer

Cluster fig

A red fig that grows in dense clusters straight from the trunk of a sacred Indian tree — mildly sweet and eaten ripe, but more often cooked green as a vegetable. A revered plant of Hindu and Buddhist tradition, and a staple of rural and Ayurvedic kitchens.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Cocona

An Amazonian relative of the tomato and naranjilla — glossy orange fruit with a tomato's body and a citrus-lime tang, cooked into savory sauces and sweet drinks across the rainforest. Neither fruit nor vegetable, and used happily as both.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Coconut

The tree of life — drink, food, oil, bowl, and rope from one ocean-borne seed. Two fruits in one lifespan: young buko with electrolyte water and silky jelly, then mature nut with rich white meat.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Cocoplum

A coastal fruit of the tropical Americas and West Africa — white, pink, or dark purple, with mild, cottony-sweet flesh around a large seed whose almond-like kernel is also eaten. A salt-tolerant dune plant made into a beloved candied preserve in Cuba and the Bahamas.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Concord grape

The intensely "grapey" blue-black American grape behind purple grape juice, jelly, and jam — a slip-skin fox grape with a bold, musky-sweet flavor utterly unlike a wine grape. Bred in Massachusetts in 1849 and the taste of American childhood.

Berry Autumn

Cornelian cherry

A dogwood that moonlights as an orchard tree — glossy scarlet fruit beloved from Istanbul to Kyiv for sherbets, preserves, and vodka. Ancient Greeks knew the wood for spears; the Caucasus knows the fruit for winter jars.

Stone fruit Summer Autumn

Crabapple

The small, hard, intensely tart ancestor of the eating apple — too sour to bite but loaded with pectin, making it the classic fruit for jelly, and a wild autumn staple across the Northern Hemisphere.

Pome Autumn

Cranberry

The bog berry that bounces — too tart to eat raw, essential once sweetened, and the only major fruit harvested by flooding fields into floating crimson seas. Thanksgiving's non-negotiable.

Berry Autumn

Crowberry

A small, glossy black berry of the far-northern tundra and moorland — mild, seedy, and watery, but abundant enough to have fed Arctic and subarctic peoples for millennia, from Iceland to Alaska.

Berry Autumn

Cucumber

Botanically a berry, culturally a salad — the cucumber is 95% water, the coolest thing in the vegetable aisle, and one of the oldest cultivated fruits in the world, grown in India for at least 3,000 years.

Melon Summer

Cupuacu

Cacao's Amazonian cousin — a heavy brown pod whose creamy white pulp tastes of chocolate crossed with tropical fruit, and whose seeds make a prized "cupulate" chocolate.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Dabai

A black, olive-like fruit of Sarawak in Borneo whose hard flesh softens in warm water into a rich, savory, avocado-like paste. Eaten with soy sauce and rice, it's a treasured local delicacy — the "Sibu olive" — that inspires seasonal devotion and steep prices.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Damson

A small, dark blue-black plum too tart and astringent to eat raw but transcendent cooked — the classic English hedgerow fruit for jam, damson gin, and deep-purple cheese. Autumn's most rewarding preserving plum.

Stone fruit Autumn

Date

The desert's candy and civilization's first sweetener — a palm fruit so energy-dense it fed caravans across empty quarters. Medjools eat like soft caramel; Deglet Noors like honeyed toffee.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Year-round

Date-plum

A small, dark, grape-sized persimmon relative from the Caucasus and Asia, sweet and honeyed when fully soft — tasting, as its name says, of both date and plum. An ancient fruit thought to be the lotus of the legendary lotus-eaters.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Davidson plum

A midnight-purple rainforest fruit that looks like a plum and bites like a lemon — Australia's sourest famous native, beloved by chefs for jams, sauces, and a color that dyes everything it touches a glorious magenta.

Stone fruit Summer Autumn

Dekopon

The mandarin with a topknot — a 1972 Japanese cross that took nearly twenty years to reach market, and now sells under three different trademarked names on three continents while being one single cultivar.

Citrus Winter Spring

Desert date

A tough, thorny tree of the Sahel and dry Africa bearing bittersweet date-like fruit — a drought-defying famine food eaten across the arid belt, with edible oil in its seed and soap-like saponins throughout. A true survival plant.

Tropical & subtropical Winter Spring

Desert lime

A tiny, tough, thornbush citrus from Australia's dry interior — pea-sized green limes with a sharp, sweet-edged flavor, eaten whole and used as one of the hardiest true citrus in the world for marmalade, drinks, and native cooking.

Citrus Spring Summer

Dewberry

A trailing, ground-hugging cousin of the blackberry that ripens weeks earlier — soft, dark, dusty-blue berries gathered along fences and roadsides, especially across the American South where dewberry cobbler marks the start of berry season.

Berry Spring Summer

Doum palm fruit

The hard, shiny, reddish-brown fruit of the gingerbread palm — its dry fibrous rind tasting genuinely of gingerbread. An ancient food of the Nile and Sahel, soaked into a cooling drink and used as medicine, found even in the tomb of Tutankhamun.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Dragon fruit

A neon-pink cactus fruit with kiwi-crunch seeds and gently sweet flesh — the night-blooming showpiece of tropical fruit stands and smoothie bowls alike.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Duhat

The purple-tongue fruit — glossy black-violet ovals with juicy, astringent sweet-sour flesh that dyes every mouth it meets. India's beloved jamun and the Philippines' childhood duhat are one and the same tree.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Durian

Southeast Asia's infamous "King of Fruits" — a spiky armored shell hiding rich, custardy flesh whose aroma divides humanity into devotees and refusers.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Eggplant

A berry that behaves like a sponge — the aubergine's open, airy flesh soaks up oil and flavour like nothing else in the kitchen, which is both its great virtue and the reason it is so often cooked badly.

Berry Summer Autumn

Elderberry

Hedgerow clusters of tiny purple-black berries — too sharp and mildly toxic to eat raw, but cooked into cordials, syrups, and wines that anchor European folk medicine and midsummer tradition.

Berry Autumn Summer

Elephant apple

A hard, green, dodecagonal fruit whose edible part is really its swollen sepals — fibrous, apple-sour, and beloved in Assamese and Bengali kitchens for the tangy dal and pickle it makes. Wild elephants crack them open, hence the name.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Feijoa

New Zealand's adopted obsession — an egg-shaped South American myrtle fruit tasting of pineapple, guava, and mint at once, scooped with a spoon and impossible to buy where it doesn't grow.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn

Fig

The inside-out flower of the ancient Mediterranean — jammy, honeyed, and seeded with a thousand crunchy achenes. Possibly the first plant humans ever cultivated, and still the taste of late summer.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Finger lime

An Australian rainforest citrus shaped like a stubby finger, filled with tiny juice pearls that burst like caviar — a native bushfood turned fine-dining garnish.

Citrus Autumn Winter

Gac

A spiky crimson Southeast Asian gourd-fruit, mild in taste but extraordinary in color — its red seed membranes are among the richest natural sources of lycopene and beta-carotene known.

Tropical & subtropical Winter Autumn

Galia melon

A netted-skin melon bred in Israel in the 1970s that ripens from green to gold — aromatic and honey-sweet like a cantaloupe but with pale-green, spicy-sweet flesh. A modern hybrid that became a global favorite, ripe when it smells and gives.

Melon Summer

Gandaria

A small golden "plum mango" from Southeast Asia — a mango relative the size of an apricot, eaten ripe and sweet or green and sour in salads and sambals across Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia.

Tropical & subtropical Spring Summer

Giant granadilla

The biggest of all passionfruits — a melon-sized, four-angled fruit whose thick spongy rind is cooked as a vegetable while its perfumed pulp is spooned out and juiced. A tropical dooryard favorite from the Caribbean to Southeast Asia.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Gingerbread plum

A hardy Sahelian fruit tree of West Africa's dry sands — its orange, plum-like fruit has mealy sweetish flesh, while the large seed hides an oil-rich edible kernel used like an almond. A dependable dry-season food where little else fruits.

Tropical & subtropical Winter Spring

Gnetum

A curious Southeast Asian tree that is neither quite a fruit tree nor a nut tree — its red-when-ripe drupes and their seeds are boiled, fried, and above all pounded into emping, the bittersweet Indonesian crackers, while the young leaves go into soup.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Goji

The scarlet berry of Ningxia that China has simmered into soups and teas for two thousand years — and the West rebranded as a superfood. Almost always eaten dried, like a savory-sweet cranberry-raisin from the tomato family.

Berry Summer Autumn

Gooseberry

The translucent, veined orb of northern kitchen gardens — mouth-puckering green for pies and fools, honeyed amber when dessert-ripe. Victorian England's competitive-growing obsession.

Berry Summer

Goumi

A speckled scarlet berry from a hardy, nitrogen-fixing East Asian shrub — astringent until dead-ripe, then sweet-tart and tomato-bright, rich in lycopene. A forager's and permaculturist's favorite that improves the soil while it feeds you.

Berry Spring Summer

Governor's plum

A small, dark-red to purple-black fruit from a thorny tropical tree — sweet-tart and juicy when fully ripe, astringent before, made into jams and jellies across Africa, Madagascar, and South Asia.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Gowok

A Javanese fruit that grows in dense purple-red clusters on the trunk — soft, juicy, and sweet-tart with a pleasant astringency, eaten fresh and in rujak. A near-forgotten dooryard fruit of Indonesia, a cousin of the jamun and wax apple.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Granadilla

The passionfruit's gentle sibling — an orange shell that cracks like an Easter egg around silvery, slurpable pulp with all of the perfume and none of the pucker. The Andes' favorite fruit to hand a child.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Grape

Humanity's most consequential fruit — eight thousand years of wine, raisins, and table grapes from one vine species. Modern breeding turned it into nature's candy; fermentation turned it into civilization's drink.

Berry Summer Autumn

Grapefruit

An 18th-century Caribbean accident — pomelo crossed with sweet orange — that became breakfast's most polarizing citrus: bitter, bracing, and beloved once your palate grows into it.

Citrus Winter Spring

Green sapote

A Central American cousin of the mamey sapote with thinner, olive-green skin and sweet, russet-red flesh tasting of pumpkin, caramel, and sweet potato. A prized but uncommon highland fruit of Guatemala and Honduras.

Tropical & subtropical Spring Summer

Greengage

A small green-to-golden dessert plum widely considered the finest-flavored of all — honeyed, richly sweet, and almost confectionery. A short-season European treasure that looks unripe even when perfect.

Stone fruit Summer

Ground cherry

A small golden husk-fruit that drops to the ground when ripe — sweet and tropical-tasting, like a blend of pineapple, tomato, and vanilla. A cold-hardy annual cousin of the cape gooseberry, beloved by gardeners and pie-makers across temperate North America.

Berry Summer Autumn

Grumichama

Brazil's answer to the cherry — a glossy purple-black fruit from the Atlantic rainforest that tastes like sweet cherry with a whisper of clove. Beloved in backyards from Bahia to São Paulo, almost unknown beyond them.

Berry Spring Summer

Guabiju

A dark purple myrtle berry of southern South America — sweet, aromatic, and resinous, tasting of blueberry and pine with a hint of the tropics. A cherished wild fruit of the grassland forests of Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina, eaten fresh and made into liqueur.

Berry Summer Autumn

Guabiroba

A small, round, yellow-green Brazilian fruit with intensely aromatic, sweet-sour flesh and a resinous, almost eucalyptus-tinged perfume. A cherished native of southern Brazil's grasslands, eaten fresh and made into juices, liqueurs, and ice cream.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Guaraná

An Amazonian climbing vine whose red fruit splits to reveal a black seed in white flesh — looking uncannily like an eye. The caffeine-packed seed powers Brazil's national soft drink and the global energy-drink industry.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn

Guava

The tropics' perfume bomb — a humble green orb whose aroma fills rooms and whose vitamin C embarrasses citrus four times over. Eaten crunchy-green with salt in Asia, pink-ripe and fragrant in the Americas.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round Autumn

Hackberry

A tiny orange-brown berry of a common North American and Eurasian tree — a thin shell of sweet, date-like flesh over a crunchy edible seed, eaten whole. One of humanity's oldest foods, found in prehistoric campsites, and a crunchy sweet nibble hiding on city trees.

Berry Autumn Winter

Harpephyllum

A tart, red, oval fruit of a handsome South African tree in the mango family — sharp and juicy, made into a rosy jelly, jam, and country wine. A cherished indigenous fruit and street tree of the eastern coast, eaten ripe and prized for preserves.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Haskap

An edible honeysuckle with oblong indigo berries that beat strawberries to the punch — the first fruit of the northern year. Ainu heritage in Hokkaido, Siberian hardiness, Canadian breeding: a berry built for the cold with a raspberry-blueberry heart.

Berry Spring Summer

Hawthorn

The small red "haws" of the hawthorn hedge — mild, apple-like, and a little dry, made into jelly, ketchup, and country wine in Europe and into sweet snacks and digestive tonics across China.

Pome Autumn

Highbush cranberry

A tart, translucent-red berry of a northern shrub that mimics the true cranberry in look and use — but isn't related at all. Gathered across North America and Eurasia for jelly and sauce, and a beloved cultural symbol (kalyna) in Ukraine.

Berry Autumn

Honeydew

The quiet melon — smooth ivory skin, pale jade flesh, and a clean, honeyed sweetness without cantaloupe's musk. Underrated because usually underripe; transcendent when allowed to finish.

Melon Summer Autumn

Horse mango

A pungent, sour wild mango of the Malay world whose species name literally means "foul-smelling" — eaten mostly green in fiery rojak and sambal, its strong flavor and irritant sap making it a fruit best handled by those who know it.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Huckleberry

The wild, un-tamed cousin of the blueberry — small, intense, and gathered by hand from mountain slopes across the American West, where it resists cultivation and remains a jealously-guarded forager's (and grizzly bear's) prize.

Berry Summer Autumn

Ice cream bean

A legume that thinks it's dessert — foot-long pods lined with cottony white pulp that tastes of vanilla ice cream. Amazonian children's favorite candy, and the shade tree that shelters half the coffee in Latin America.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Ilama

A large Central American custard apple with a well-kept secret: some trees bear white-fleshed fruit, others a stunning rose-pink, both sweet and creamy. A lowland Pacific-coast relative of the cherimoya, prized where it grows and rare everywhere else.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Illawarra plum

A curious "plum" from an Australian conifer — the swollen purple-black stalk beneath the seed is the edible part, with a resinous, plum-and-pine flavor used in native jams, sauces, and desserts along the east coast.

Berry Autumn Winter

Imbe

A small, bright-orange African relative of the mangosteen with thin skin and tangy-sweet flesh clinging to a large seed. A hardy savanna and riverbank tree whose fruit is eaten fresh, brewed into wine, and gathered from the wild across eastern and southern Africa.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Iyokan

Japan's second-most-grown citrus and almost unknown outside it — a thick-skinned, strongly aromatic winter orange from Ehime Prefecture, sweeter than it smells and named after a province that no longer exists.

Citrus Winter Spring

Jabuticaba

The tree that fruits on its own trunk — grape-like black berries that erupt straight from the bark, with sweet translucent flesh and a thick, tannic, wine-toned skin.

Berry Spring Summer

Jackalberry

The sweet yellow fruit of a giant African savanna tree — a wild persimmon relative loved by jackals, elephants, and people alike, eaten fresh, dried, or brewed into beer across the continent's bushveld.

Tropical & subtropical Winter Spring

Jackfruit

The largest tree-borne fruit on earth — up to 40 kg of bumpy green armor around honeyed golden pods that taste like Juicy Fruit gum, plus an unripe stage that shreds like pulled pork.

Tropical & subtropical Spring Summer

Japanese quince

The small, hard, intensely tart fruit of the ornamental flowering quince — too sour to eat raw, but so aromatic and vitamin-C-rich that it's a beloved souring and preserving fruit in the Baltics, where it's nicknamed the "northern lemon."

Pome Autumn

Japanese raisin tree

A tree whose "fruit" is really its swollen, twisted flower stalks — crisp, sweet, and tasting of raisin and pear when ripe. An East Asian curiosity long used as a hangover remedy, the source of a compound now studied for exactly that.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn

Jenipapo

A grey-brown tropical fruit famous twice over — as the source of a blue-black body paint used by Amazonian peoples for millennia, and, ripe and soft, as the base of a musky-sweet Brazilian liqueur and syrup that tastes of dried apple and molasses.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Jering

A Southeast Asian legume seed eaten with real enthusiasm and real caution — dark glossy beans with a garlicky, faintly rank flavour, and a documented ability to crystallise in the urinary tract if eaten to excess.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Jostaberry

A thornless German-bred cross of blackcurrant and gooseberry — glossy black berries with the currant's deep musk and the gooseberry's bright tang. A modern hybrid built for the home garden, spilling into jams, cordials, and summer puddings.

Berry Summer

Jujube

China's red date — crisp apple-snack when fresh, caramel-chewy "date" when dried, and a four-thousand-year fixture of Chinese kitchens, medicine chests, and wedding beds alike.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn

Jussara

The Atlantic-forest twin of açaí — a slender palm whose purple fruit makes an identical rich drink, but which was nearly wiped out because its prized heart-of-palm can only be taken by felling the tree. Now a conservation cause, with fruit-harvesting the key to saving it.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Kabosu

A round green Japanese seasoning citrus from Ōita Prefecture, used hard and green like sudachi but larger and rounder — its cool, aromatic juice squeezed over grilled fish, hot pot, and sashimi through autumn.

Citrus Autumn

Kair

A small red berry of a leafless, thorny desert shrub of the Thar — sharp and pungent, pickled and curried into the beloved Rajasthani dish ker sangri. A hardy caper relative that fruits in country too harsh for almost anything else.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Kakadu plum

A small olive-green fruit from Australia's Top End holding the highest vitamin C ever recorded in a fruit — orders of magnitude beyond oranges. Harvested from wild trees by Aboriginal communities, it powers a growing Indigenous-led industry.

Stone fruit Autumn Winter

Kangaroo apple

An egg-shaped orange fruit of a fast-growing Australian and New Zealand shrub — sweet and mildly tomato-like when fully ripe, but toxic until then. A traditional Aboriginal and Māori food that demands exact ripeness, and a modern source of a steroid-drug precursor.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Kaphal

The Himalayan hill fruit that appears for a few weeks each spring and never reaches a shop — small crimson berries sold in paper cones on mountain roadsides from Uttarakhand to Nepal, sweet-sour and gone within days.

Berry Spring Summer

Karonda

A thorny hedge shrub's pink-and-purple berries — mouth-puckeringly sour when green, wine-sweet when black, and a monsoon-season fixture of Indian pickle jars and tart pink sherbets.

Berry Summer

Karuka

The prized nut pandanus of the New Guinea highlands — a giant screwpine whose huge seed heads yield oily, protein-rich kernels tasting of walnut and coconut. Its harvest is so important that whole families migrate to the forest for "karuka season."

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Kei apple

A golden, apricot-bright fruit from southern Africa's most famous living fence — the thorny kei apple hedge. Ferociously tart off the branch, it turns into standout jam, and its vitamin C rivals citrus.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Keledang

A rare Bornean member of the jackfruit family whose spiny orange-red fruit hides sweet, juicy, marang-like flesh. A forest and dooryard treasure of the Malay world, quick to spoil and rarely seen beyond it.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Kelubi

A sour, scaly-skinned swamp-palm fruit of the Malay Peninsula — a tart cousin of the snake fruit (salak), used as a souring agent and pickled into a tangy relish. A wild wetland fruit of Southeast Asia, sharp enough to make salak seem sweet.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Keppel

The fabled "deodorant fruit" of Javanese royalty — a russet, trunk-borne cousin of the custard apple whose sweet, mango-and-violet flesh was said to perfume the sweat and breath of the keraton's princesses. Now rare enough to be a conservation cause.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Key lime

A small, thin-skinned, intensely aromatic lime with more floral tartness than the common Persian lime — the true lime of Key lime pie, Mexican cooking, and the classic daiquiri.

Citrus Summer Autumn

Khirni

A tiny golden-yellow Indian fruit from a hardy relative of the sapodilla — sweet, soft, and honeyed with a hint of caramel, gathered from wild and temple trees across the dry subcontinent. A cherished, near-forgotten summer fruit of rural India and Sri Lanka.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Kiwano

A spiky orange melon from the African drylands, its alien shell hiding lime-green jelly studded with seeds — refreshing, cucumber-meets-kiwi, and more spectacle than sweetness.

Melon Summer Autumn

Kiwi

A Chinese vine fruit rebranded by New Zealand into a global icon — emerald flesh, edible black seeds, dessert-bright acidity, and more vitamin C than an orange, gram for gram.

Berry Winter Spring

Kiwiberry

A kiwi the size of a grape with smooth, fuzz-free skin you eat whole — sweeter than its big cousin and hardy to brutal frosts. East Asia's mountain forests knew it first; orchards from Oregon to Poland are catching up.

Berry Autumn

Kokum

A dark-purple relative of the mangosteen from India's Konkan coast — its sun-dried rind is a prized souring agent, and its cooling pink sharbat is a monsoon lifesaver. Also the source of kokum butter for cooking and cosmetics.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Korean melon

A small, oval, golden melon striped with white ridges — crisp, lightly sweet, and eaten whole, seeds and skin included. A beloved summer fruit across Korea and East Asia, more refreshing and less sugary than a cantaloupe.

Melon Summer

Kuini

A powerfully perfumed wild mango of Southeast Asia — deep-orange, fibrous, and turpentine-rich, with an aroma so intense it fills a room. Loved for juices, sambals, and desserts where its heady scent is the whole point.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Kumquat

The backwards citrus — you eat the sweet peel and wince at the sour flesh, whole and unpeeled, two bites at a time. A Lunar New Year icon and the boldest snack in the citrus family.

Citrus Winter

Kwai muk

A small, knobbly, orange-red relative of the jackfruit from southern China — soft, sweet-tart, and intensely flavored, with a sticky latex and an irregular shape. A rare backyard treasure, eaten fresh or dried into a chewy sweet.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn

Lai

A Bornean cousin of the durian with vivid orange flesh and — crucially — a far milder smell. Sweet, creamy, and low in the notorious pungency, it's the durian for people who can't abide durian, and a prized fruit of Kalimantan and Sarawak.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Lakoocha

A knobbly jackfruit relative from South and Southeast Asia with irregular, velvety golden fruit whose sweet-sour pulp is eaten fresh, in chutneys, and cooked green as a vegetable. The tree's heartwood is also a traditional dewormer.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Lanzones

Southeast Asia's translucent grape-in-a-jacket — dusty tan clusters hiding segments of sweet-tart, grapefruit-honey flesh. The pride of Camiguin island and Laguna province, celebrated with its own festival.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn

Lasora

A small, sticky-fleshed Indian fruit famous for its mucilage — pickled green into the tangy Gujarati and Rajasthani gunda pickle, eaten ripe as a mild sweet, and once used as a natural glue. A hardy, ancient dry-land tree fruit.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Lemon

The kitchen's universal acid — a citron-sour orange hybrid whose juice seasons, preserves, tenderizes, and brightens virtually every cuisine on earth. Meyer lemons add a sweeter, floral variation.

Citrus Winter Year-round

Lemon aspen

A pale, marble-sized rainforest fruit from Queensland with an intense lemon-lime-grapefruit flavor — one of the most versatile Australian native "bush tucker" fruits, used in dressings, sauces, drinks, and desserts.

Citrus Autumn Winter

Lemon drop mangosteen

A small orange Central American relative of the mangosteen whose soft segments taste exactly like a lemon-drop candy — sweet, intensely citrusy, and tangy. A backyard favorite in the tropics, prized for its uncanny sherbet flavor.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Lilly pilly

A pink-to-magenta, crisp Australian berry from a hugely popular hedge and street tree — tart-sweet with a clove-and-apple tang, made into a sharp, rosy jam and bush-food sauces. The fruit millions of Australians walk past every day.

Berry Summer Autumn

Lime

The tropical acid — sharper and greener-tasting than lemon, indispensable from Mexican taquerías to Thai curries to the world's cocktail shakers. Where the lemon can't grow, the lime rules.

Citrus Year-round

Limequat

A small oval citrus crossing a lime with a kumquat — sharply sour flesh wrapped in a thin, sweet, edible rind, so you can pop the whole fruit at once. A cold-hardy, heavy-bearing hybrid bred in Florida for lime flavor in cooler climates.

Citrus Autumn Winter

Lingonberry

The tart red jewel of the Nordic and boreal forests — small, firm, cranberry-like berries whose natural preservative acids let a simple stir of sugar keep them for a year.

Berry Autumn

Loganberry

The accidental 1881 cross of blackberry and raspberry from a California garden — long, dark-red, wine-tart berries too sharp for most fresh eating but magnificent in pies, cordials, and the famous loganberry drink of Western New York.

Berry Summer

Longan

The "dragon's eye" — lychee's smaller, tan-shelled cousin with muskier honey flavor and a black seed staring from translucent flesh. Beloved fresh in summer, dried year-round in Chinese kitchens and teas.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Loquat

Spring''s first stone fruit impostor — an apricot-colored pome (apple family!) with juicy, floral sweet-tart flesh and big glossy seeds. A backyard giveaway across the subtropics, a cough-syrup icon in China.

Pome Spring

Lúcuma

Peru's beloved golden fruit — dry, dense flesh tasting of maple, sweet potato, and butterscotch. Almost never eaten out of hand, it is the country's favorite ice-cream flavor and has been painted on pottery for 2,000 years.

Tropical & subtropical Spring Summer

Lychee

China's imperial berry — rose-scented, grape-fleshed, jade-seeded, and adored for two millennia. An emperor famously ran pony express relays just to deliver it fresh; one taste explains why.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Spring

Mabolo

The Philippine "velvet apple" — a persimmon relative in a striking velvety pink-red skin, with sweet, dense cream-colored flesh and a famously strong, cheesy-fruity aroma.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Macambo

A large, ridged relative of cacao from the Amazon, with sweet white pulp like its cousin and — unusually — big, edible seeds that are roasted like chestnuts or almonds. An ancient Amazonian crop enjoying a revival as a superfood snack.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Madd

West Africa's fiercely sour liana fruit — a hard green-yellow ball that cracks open on a mass of orange, tamarind-tart pulp packets. Sold by the basket at Dakar roadsides and turned into the juice that defines a Senegalese hot season.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Mahobohobo

The best-loved wild fruit of the miombo woodlands — a russet-brown ball with sweet, sticky, pear-and-caramel pulp that draws whole communities into the bush each autumn across Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Mahua

The tree whose flowers are the crop — thick, fleshy, intensely sweet corollas that drop at dawn and are gathered by the sackful across central India, eaten, dried, and distilled into the spirit that carries the tree's name.

Tropical & subtropical Spring

Makrut lime

The bumpy, warty lime whose double-lobed leaves perfume tom yum, green curry, and half the kitchens of Southeast Asia. The fruit gives little juice — this is a citrus you cook with, prized for zest and leaf rather than the glass.

Citrus Year-round

Malay apple

A glossy, deep-crimson bell-shaped tropical fruit with crisp white flesh — mild, sweet, and refreshingly watery, spread by ancient Polynesian voyagers across the Pacific and grown from Malaysia to Hawaii.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Mamey sapote

The salmon-fleshed giant of Latin America — a rough brown football hiding flesh like sweet-potato custard laced with almond, apricot, and pumpkin spice. Cuba's milkshake monarch.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Spring

Mammee apple

A big brown cannonball of a Caribbean fruit whose firm orange flesh tastes of apricot, peach, and raspberry. Not to be confused with the mamey sapote — this is a different tree entirely, eaten fresh, stewed, and steeped into the old French liqueur crème de mamey.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Mamoncillo

The Caribbean's summer street fruit — grape-green leather balls cracked open with your teeth for a slippery, salmon-pink pulp that tastes of lychee crossed with lime sherbet. Sold in bunches on every corner from San Juan to Cartagena.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Mandarin

The easy-peeling, kid-friendly citrus — one of the three ancestral citrus species from which oranges, grapefruits, and most hybrids descend. Sweet, seedless modern types made it a lunchbox superpower.

Citrus Winter Autumn

Mangaba

The soft, fragrant fruit of a rubber-producing cerrado tree — sweet-tart and creamy when dead-ripe, milky and mouth-gripping if picked too soon. Northeast Brazil turns it into ice cream and juice, and the name itself means "good thing to eat."

Tropical & subtropical Spring Summer

Mango

The world's most beloved tropical stone fruit — honey-sweet golden flesh with floral, resinous notes. The Philippine Carabao variety is prized as one of the sweetest on earth.

Stone fruit Spring Summer

Mangosteen

The "Queen of Fruits" — a deep-purple shell that opens to snow-white segments tasting of lychee, peach, and citrus sorbet. Once so coveted Queen Victoria allegedly offered a reward for a fresh one.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Mangrove apple

The sour green fruit of a mangrove tree — flat and cheese-scented, with a tangy pulp made into refreshing juices, sherbets, and sour soups across coastal Southeast Asia. A tidal-forest fruit central to Vietnamese and Indonesian riverside cooking.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Manila tamarind

Not a true tamarind but a curly, coiled pod hiding sweet-and-sour pink or white pulp around shiny black seeds. A hardy street and dryland tree from Mexico to the Philippines, its pods a cherished childhood snack.

Tropical & subtropical Spring Summer

Maqui

A tiny, intensely dark-purple berry from the forests of Patagonia — sacred to the Mapuche people, among the most anthocyanin-rich fruits measured, and a rising South American superfruit.

Berry Summer Autumn

Marang

Mindanao's aromatic jackfruit cousin — a bristly green pod that opens to soft, snow-white segments tasting of custard, banana, and pear, with an intense perfume and a short shelf life.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Marionberry

Oregon's celebrated blackberry cultivar — glossy, medium-large, and deeply flavored with a wine-like balance of sweet, tart, and earthy notes. Bred in Marion County in 1956 and now the state's signature berry.

Berry Summer

Marula

Southern Africa's golden windfall fruit — a plum-sized cousin of the mango whose tart, floral flesh feeds villages, breweries, and the famous cream liqueur. Whole ecosystems and economies pick it up off the ground every February.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Matoa

A brown-shelled Pacific fruit in the lychee family whose translucent flesh tastes like a mix of rambutan, longan, and coconut. The pride of Papua, gathered from towering rainforest trees across New Guinea and the Pacific islands.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Mayapple

A single golden fruit nestled beneath the umbrella leaves of a North American woodland plant — sweet, tropical-tasting, and safe only when fully ripe, since every other part of the plant is toxic. A wild forager's cautious treat, made into a fragrant jelly and drink.

Berry Summer

Mayhaw

A small red hawthorn from the swamps of the American Deep South, ripening in May when little else does — too tart to eat raw, but the source of a pale, ruby jelly so prized it has its own festivals across Louisiana, Texas, and Georgia.

Pome Spring

Maypop

North America's hardy native passionfruit — an egg-shaped green fruit that "may pop" underfoot, filling with sweet-tart, aromatic pulp. A wild fruit of the American South whose flower and leaf are also a famous calming herbal tea.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Medlar

A near-forgotten medieval pome eaten only once it has "bletted" — softened past ripeness into a spiced, apple-butter-like flesh that tastes of cinnamon, date, and toffee.

Pome Autumn Winter

Menteng

A small yellow-to-reddish fruit that hangs in dense clusters from the trunk of a Javanese forest tree — sweet-sour translucent flesh clinging to seeds, a nostalgic dooryard fruit of Indonesia now increasingly hard to find.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Meyer lemon

A lemon-mandarin hybrid with thin, fragrant skin and low-acid, faintly sweet juice — rounder and more floral than a grocery lemon. A backyard and chef's darling that bruises too easily to ship far.

Citrus Winter Spring

Midyim

A tiny white-and-purple speckled berry from a low Australian coastal shrub — soft, sweet, and gently spicy with a gingery-eucalyptus note. A traditional Aboriginal bush food now popular as a fresh native berry and garnish.

Berry Summer Autumn

Mirabelle

Tiny golden plums, sweet with a honeyed tartness, that ripen by the tonne in France's Lorraine — where 70% of the world's crop becomes tarts, jam, and a famous crystal-clear eau-de-vie.

Stone fruit Summer

Miracle fruit

A small red West African berry with a startling trick — its protein miraculin coats the tongue and makes sour foods taste intensely sweet for up to an hour, though the berry itself is nearly flavorless.

Berry Year-round

Mobola plum

A yellow-brown, plum-sized African fruit with mealy, sweet-sour flesh tasting of dried apricot and pear — a valued wild savanna food across southern and central Africa, eaten fresh, dried, and brewed into a traditional beer.

Tropical & subtropical Spring Summer

Monkey jack

A small, wild jackfruit relative from Southeast Asia — round, rough, and orange-skinned, with sweet-sour deep-orange flesh and crunchy edible seeds. A forest fruit beloved by monkeys and foragers, sharper and smaller than its famous cousins.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Monkey orange

A hard-shelled African savanna fruit like a green cannonball, hiding sweet-sour brown pulp around many seeds. A prized wild food across the bush — but one that must be fully ripe, as the unripe fruit is toxic.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Monstera fruit

Yes — that houseplant. In its native jungles the Swiss-cheese plant bears a scaly green cob that ripens over a full year into flesh tasting of pineapple, banana, and jackfruit. Delicious when ready; needle-sharp punishment when rushed.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Mortiño

A small, dark, wild high-Andean blueberry — sweet-tart and intense, gathered from misty páramo slopes above the treeline. The essential fruit of Ecuador's colada morada, the traditional purple drink of the Day of the Dead.

Berry Autumn

Mountain papaya

A small, fragrant, cold-hardy cousin of the papaya from the high Andes — too astringent to eat raw, but transformed by cooking into some of South America's most beloved preserves, candied sweets, and aromatic drinks.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Mube

A purple, egg-shaped East Asian fruit like a sweeter akebi that never splits open — sweet, mild, jelly-like pulp full of seeds, foraged in Japan and China. Once an imperial tribute fruit in Japan, still offered ceremonially today.

Berry Autumn

Mulberry

The silk tree's secret dessert — blackberry-lookalike fruit that stains fingers purple and never reaches supermarkets because it dissolves in transit. A backyard and market-stall treasure worldwide.

Berry Summer Spring

Muntries

Pea-sized "emu apples" from a ground-hugging vine on South Australia's coast — crisp little berries that taste uncannily of spiced Granny Smith apple with a juniper whisper. A Ngarrindjeri staple turned native-food darling.

Berry Summer Autumn

Muscadine

The American South's own grape — thick-skinned, musky-sweet, and utterly unbothered by heat, humidity, and the pests that ruin European vines. Eaten by the porch-bucket, jellied, and fermented since before the colonies had names.

Berry Summer Autumn

Nam-nam

A curious Southeast Asian fruit that grows straight from the trunk — wrinkled, kidney-shaped brown pods that look almost brain-like, with crisp sour-sweet flesh eaten fresh with sugar, pickled, or fried into a tangy snack.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Nance

Small golden fruits with a powerful, cheesy-fermented aroma and an oily, sweet-sour flesh — a nostalgic street snack across Mexico and Central America, sold in syrup or with chili and salt.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Nannyberry

A blue-black North American berry that ripens sweet, soft, and date-like — tasting of banana and raisin around a large flat seed. A wild fruit of the northern woods and hedgerows, gathered late into autumn and eaten fresh or made into fruit butter.

Berry Autumn

Naranjilla

The Andes' "little orange" — a fuzzy orange fruit with electric-green, intensely tangy pulp that makes one of South America's most refreshing juices, rhubarb-meets-lime-meets-pineapple in a glass.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Natal plum

A crimson, plum-shaped South African fruit with a sweet-tart, cranberry-strawberry flavor and soft red flesh — eaten fresh and made into a ruby jam. A thorny, salt-tolerant coastal hedge whose milky-sapped unripe fruit ripens into a genuine treat.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Native cherry

An Australian "cherry" that wears its seed on the outside — the sweet, edible part is a swollen red-to-purple stalk, with the single seed sitting on top. A curious sandalwood relative and traditional Aboriginal food, from a tree that grows half-parasitically on the roots of others.

Berry Summer Autumn

Native tamarind

An Australian rainforest fruit whose capsules split to reveal seeds wrapped in bright orange, intensely tart flesh — a native souring fruit used in drinks, sauces, and jams, and a lychee-family relative despite its tamarind-like tang.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Natsumikan

The Japanese citrus that has to be left on the tree through winter and picked in summer, because it is too sour to eat when it looks ripe. A thick-skinned, sharply refreshing fruit that taught a whole region patience.

Citrus Spring Summer

Nectarine

Not a peach-plum cross — just a peach that lost its fuzz to a single recessive gene. Smoother, often firmer and tangier than its twin, with the same summer-stone-fruit soul.

Stone fruit Summer

Nipa palm fruit

The translucent jelly cubes in your ice kacang — cut from a mangrove palm that grows in tidal mud, gathered from a football-sized cluster of seeds, and one of the few crops harvested from a plant with no trunk at all.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Noni

A knobbly, pale, pungent tropical fruit famous less for flavor than for its potent smell and its reputation as a Polynesian and Southeast Asian medicine. A hardy pioneer plant whose fermented juice became a global health fad.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Okra

A hibiscus relative grown for its immature seed pods — famous, and often avoided, for the mucilage that thickens a gumbo and ruins a stir-fry, depending entirely on how you cook it.

Berry Summer Autumn

Oleaster

A silvery, mealy, date-like fruit from a hardy Central Asian tree — dry and sweet with a floury texture, eaten across Iran and the Caucasus, where dried senjed is a symbol of love on the Persian New Year table.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn

Olive

The Mediterranean's most consequential fruit — far too bitter to eat off the tree, so the world learned to cure it in brine or press it for oil. A drupe that shaped whole cuisines and economies.

Stone fruit Autumn Winter

Orange

The world's benchmark citrus — an ancient pomelo-mandarin hybrid whose name became a color and whose vitamin C reputation launched a juice industry. Navels for eating, Valencias for squeezing.

Citrus Winter Spring

Oregon grape

A dusty-blue, tart wild berry from a holly-leaved shrub of the Pacific Northwest — sharp and seedy, made into a beautiful blue-purple jelly and wine. The state flower of Oregon, and a plant whose bright-yellow roots are a famous herbal medicine.

Berry Summer Autumn

Oroblanco

A grapefruit-pomelo hybrid bred to lose the bitterness — a green-skinned, seedless citrus with sweet, mild, juicy flesh and almost none of the sharpness that makes people wince at grapefruit. A modern breeding success from California and Israel.

Citrus Winter

Otaheite gooseberry

Pale ribbed fruit that dangles in grape-like ropes straight from the branch, sharp enough to make lemons nervous. A tropical dooryard tree from India to the Caribbean, grown for pickles, candy, and blush-pink syrups rather than fresh eating.

Berry Spring Autumn

Palmyra fruit

The fruit of the towering palmyra palm — tender, translucent jelly-seeds eaten as cooling "ice apple" in the South Asian summer, and a fibrous orange ripe pulp used for sweets and drinks. A whole-plant lifeline of the dry tropics.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Pandanus fruit

The large, segmented orange-red fruit of the coastal screwpine — a spiky ball of wedge-shaped "keys" chewed and juiced across the Pacific and eaten cooked as a staple in Micronesia. A canoe plant of many uses, from famine food to the aroma of Southeast Asian cooking.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Papaya

A soft, sunset-orange melon-like fruit that grows like a palm-tree lantern — gentle, musky sweetness, legendary digestive enzymes, and a green unripe stage that's a vegetable in its own right.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Passion fruit

The loudest flavor per gram in the fruit kingdom — a wrinkled shell of golden pulp whose tropical-tart perfume can season a whole cake with one spoonful. Wrinkles mean ready, not ruined.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Patawá

A stately Amazonian palm whose purple-black fruit yields a rich, protein-heavy "milk" and a fine oil so like olive oil that it has been proposed as a substitute. Drunk as a nourishing beverage across the Amazon, it is açaí's oilier, more sustaining cousin.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Pawpaw

North America's largest native fruit — a temperate cousin of the cherimoya with soft, tropical-tasting custard flesh of banana, mango, and vanilla, almost never sold because it bruises in a day.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn

Peach

Summer's velvet icon — a Chinese stone fruit of immortality myths, perfected into juice-down-your-arm ripeness. White peaches run floral and sweet; yellow ones balance sugar with a wine-like tang.

Stone fruit Summer

Peach palm

A fruit you boil, not bite — the orange-red fruit of a spiny Central and South American palm, cooked in salted water until its dense flesh eats like a cross between chestnut and buttered potato. A pre-Columbian staple sold from street carts across the tropics.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Pear

The apple's silkier cousin — buttery, perfumed flesh that ripens from the inside out and rewards patience like few other fruits. Asian pears add a crisp, juicy alternate personality.

Pome Autumn Winter

Pepino

A mild, mellow Andean fruit that looks like a purple-streaked golden egg and tastes like a cross between honeydew and cucumber — refreshing, low-sugar, and eaten like a melon.

Melon Summer Autumn

Pequi

The golden, funky heart of Brazil's Cerrado — an oily fruit you must nibble with care, because under its buttery flesh waits a disc of hidden spines. Loved to the point of festivals in Goiás and Minas, baffling to everyone else.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Persimmon

Autumn's lantern — a glowing orange fruit with two personalities: crisp, sweet Fuyu eaten like an apple, and Hachiya, an astringency bomb that transforms into apricot-honey custard when fully soft.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Petai

The stink bean of Southeast Asia — flat emerald pods hiding rows of almond-shaped seeds with a garlic-and-gas pungency that lingers on the eater for a day or more. Adored in Malaysia, Indonesia and southern Thailand, and unmistakable.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Phalsa

Tiny purple berries sold by the paper cone in the fiercest weeks of the South Asian summer — sweet-sour, cooling, and gone in a blink. Phalsa season is short, scorching, and adored from Karachi to Varanasi.

Berry Summer

Pindo palm

A hardy South American palm bearing hanging clusters of small yellow-orange fruit that taste of pineapple, banana, and apricot — sweet-tart and fibrous, famous for the amber "pindo jelly" and country wine made from them, and cold-hardy enough to fruit far from the tropics.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Pineapple

A South American bromeliad that became the crown of tropical fruit — literally the symbol of hospitality. Sweet-sharp golden flesh, a protein-eating enzyme, and a Philippine export empire.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Year-round

Pitomba

A small yellow-orange fruit that grows in grape-like clusters across northeastern Brazil — a lychee relative whose thin brittle shell cracks to reveal translucent, sweet-tart flesh clinging to a large seed. A beloved seasonal street snack.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Plantain

The banana that went savory — bigger, starchier, and thicker-skinned, treated as a vegetable from Lagos to San Juan to Manila. Green it's a potato; black it's dessert; every stage in between has a recipe.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Plum

The most varied stone fruit — from candy-sweet Japanese hybrids to honeyed greengages to tart damsons — plus a second life as the prune, the fruit world's most rehabilitated dried good.

Stone fruit Summer Autumn

Pomegranate

The jewel box of fruits — a leathery red vault packed with hundreds of ruby arils, each a burst of sweet-tart juice around a crunchy seed. Persia's ancient symbol of abundance, now a superfood-aisle fixture.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Pomelo

The largest citrus on earth and the wild ancestor of the grapefruit — thick-armored, gently sweet, and never bitter, with firm juice vesicles that snap like citrus caviar.

Citrus Autumn Winter

Prickly pear

The cactus orchard's candy — neon-fleshed fruit off the nopal paddle, tasting of watermelon and bubblegum, armed with invisible hairline spines that demand respect and tongs.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Pulasan

Rambutan's sweeter, richer cousin — a dark-red fruit covered in short, thick, blunt spines, with juicy translucent flesh that pulls cleanly from the seed.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Pumpkin

The giant orange berry of autumn — botanically a fruit, culturally a vegetable, and one of the oldest domesticated plants in the Americas. Its flesh, seeds, flowers and even the young shoots are all eaten.

Melon Autumn Winter

Quandong

The scarlet "desert peach" of the Australian outback — a glowing red drupe on a half-parasitic sandalwood cousin, tart as dried apricot and treasured by Aboriginal peoples for millennia. Its pitted stone is as famous as its flesh.

Stone fruit Spring Summer

Quince

The golden, perfumed ancestor of marmalade — rock-hard and astringent raw, but cooked it turns rose-pink, silky, and intensely aromatic. The most transformative fruit in the kitchen.

Pome Autumn

Rambai

Velvety tan fruit hanging in long strings straight from the trunk — a Malaysian and Bornean village favorite with translucent, sweet-sour segments like a softer, wilder lanzones. Rarely farmed at scale, mostly shared over fences.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Rambutan

A lychee cousin in a wild red-and-green hairy shell — sweet, floral, grape-like flesh that makes it Southeast Asia's most fun fruit to peel.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn

Rangpur

An orange-skinned citrus hybrid of mandarin and lemon that looks like a small tangerine but is fiercely acidic — a "lime" in flavor with a mandarin's color and aroma, used for marmalade, cordials, and a famously good gin and tonic.

Citrus Winter

Raspberry

The most perfumed berry — a hollow crown of drupelets with huge flavor, huge fiber, remarkably little sugar, and a shelf life measured in hours. Eat them the day you meet them.

Berry Summer Autumn

Redcurrant

Translucent ruby beads on delicate strings — tart, jewel-bright berries that shine in jellies, sauces, and as the classic garnish frosted with sugar.

Berry Summer

Riberry

Pink, pear-shaped mini-fruit from an Australian rainforest lilly pilly, tasting of cranberry warmed with clove and cinnamon. A street-tree berry hiding in plain sight that became one of the native-food movement's most useful ingredients.

Berry Summer

Ridge gourd

The ridged Indian gourd eaten young and tender — mild, spongy and quick to absorb whatever it is cooked with. Left on the vine it dries into the loofah in your bathroom, which is the same plant at a later stage.

Melon Summer Autumn

Rio Grande cherry

A dark red-to-purple Brazilian cherry from the Atlantic forest — glossy, juicy, and sweet with a slight tang, ripening fast in late spring. A cherished southern-Brazilian native, less known than the pitanga but rated by many as the finest of the Eugenia cherries.

Berry Spring Summer

Rose apple

A small, crisp, hollow fruit whose pale flesh genuinely tastes and smells of rosewater — light, floral, and more perfume than sugar, best eaten fresh off the tree.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Spring

Rose myrtle

A sweet purple berry of a downy-leaved Asian shrub — soft, aromatic, and honey-sweet with a hint of nut, gathered from hillsides across South China and Southeast Asia. A beloved wild snack and wine fruit, and a notorious invader where it has escaped.

Berry Summer

Rosehip

The scarlet fruit of the wild rose, one of the richest natural sources of vitamin C — made into syrup, jam, and tea across Europe, and famously bottled as rosehip syrup to keep children healthy in wartime Britain.

Berry Autumn

Roselle

The crimson calyx behind hibiscus tea — not a flower and not quite a fruit, but the fleshy sepal cup that swells around the seed pod after the bloom drops. Steeped from Senegal to Mexico to Egypt, always deep red and sharply tart.

Berry Autumn Winter

Rowan

The bright-orange berry clusters of the mountain ash — sharply bitter and tart raw, but a classic autumn jelly for game and a folklore-laden tree of the far north. Sweeter after frost, always cooked.

Pome Autumn

Rukam

A round red-to-purple fruit of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, crisp and sweet-tart when ripe, astringent before — traditionally rolled between the palms to tame it. A hardy dooryard fruit eaten fresh, stewed, and pickled.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Safou

Central Africa's "butterfruit" — a glossy indigo fruit that roasts into something like warm, tangy avocado butter. Eaten with grilled corn on a million street corners, it's a savory fruit that behaves like a vegetable and nourishes like a meal.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Salak

The snake fruit — a fig-sized teardrop wrapped in genuine reptile-pattern scales, hiding crisp ivory lobes that taste of pineapple, pear, and something fermented-honeyed. Indonesia's spikiest handshake.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round Summer

Salal

A dark blue-purple berry of the Pacific Northwest understory — mild, sweet, and slightly spicy, a staple food of the coastal First Nations who dried it into cakes. The plant's glossy leaves are also the florist trade's favorite greenery.

Berry Summer Autumn

Salmonberry

A glowing orange-to-red bramble berry of the Pacific Northwest rainforest — one of the first fruits of spring, gathered for millennia by coastal First Nations who ate its berries and young shoots alike.

Berry Spring Summer

Sansapote

A large, rough-skinned Central American fruit with sweet, deep-orange, fibrous flesh tasting of pumpkin and sweet potato. A humble backyard sapote of Mexico and the isthmus, eaten fresh off the tree and beloved by children and monkeys alike.

Tropical & subtropical Spring Summer

Santol

The cotton fruit — a golden tennis ball whose sour rind hides sweet, cottony white segments you suck rather than chew. A Filipino and Thai backyard classic with a serious don't-swallow-the-seed rule.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Sapodilla

The brown-sugar fruit — dusty tan skin over caramel flesh that tastes like a pear baked in molasses. Also the tree that gave the world chewing gum, before synthetics took the job.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Winter

Sapucaia

A Brazilian rainforest tree whose woody, pot-shaped fruit pops off its own lid to drop rich, creamy nuts — the "paradise nut," rated even finer than the Brazil nut. The emptied urn-like pods, called monkey pots, are a curiosity in their own right.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Saskatoon berry

The purple berry the Canadian prairies are literally named after — Saskatoon the city took its name from the Cree misâskwatômina. Blueberry-lookalike with a sweet almond soul, it powered pemmican for centuries and pies ever since.

Berry Summer

Satsuma

The seedless, loose-skinned mandarin of Japanese winters — sweet, easy to peel by hand, and hardy enough to grow where other citrus can't. Japan's beloved kotatsu-side mikan and the American South's Christmas orange.

Citrus Autumn Winter

Schisandra

A bright-red berry from an East Asian vine famous for tasting of all five flavors at once — sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and pungent. Brewed into Korea's rosy omija tea and revered in Chinese medicine as a tonic and adaptogen more than eaten as fruit.

Berry Autumn

Sea buckthorn

Vivid orange berries that cling in dense clusters to thorny coastal and mountain shrubs — bracingly sour, wildly nutritious, and rich in a rare fruit oil used for skin and health.

Berry Autumn

Sea grape

The fruit of the salt-tolerant tree that lines Caribbean and Gulf beaches — hanging clusters of green-to-purple grapes with a single big seed, thin sweet-tart flesh, and a jelly so beloved it defines Bahamian and Floridian summers.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Service tree fruit

A small apple- or pear-shaped fruit of an ancient European tree, hard and astringent until it's bletted soft like a medlar — then sweet, spicy, and date-like. A near-forgotten orchard fruit once vital for cider, preserves, and long keeping.

Pome Autumn

Seville orange

The bitter orange too sharp to eat raw but essential to marmalade, to the sauce bigarade, and to orange-blossom water. One of citrus's foundational hybrids, valued for rind, aroma, and acidity rather than sweetness.

Citrus Winter

Shea fruit

The sweet green fruit that surrounds the famous shea nut — soft, mildly sweet flesh eaten fresh across the West African savanna during the hungry season, while the seed inside becomes the world's beloved shea butter. Two gifts from one tree.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Shikuwasa

Okinawa's small green souring citrus — sharp enough to be used like a lime, squeezed over everything from grilled fish to awamori, and grown in villages that keep turning up in longevity research.

Citrus Autumn Winter

Shipova

A rare botanical curiosity — a natural hybrid of the pear and the whitebeam — bearing small, sweet, pear-like fruit with a rosy blush. Grown for centuries in a few European gardens, it fruits reliably where its parents struggle and tastes better than either.

Pome Autumn

Sidr

A small, round, date-like fruit of a sacred thorny tree of the Middle East and Sahel — sweet, mealy, and apple-scented, eaten fresh and dried, and revered across religions. Its blossoms yield the world-famous, prized sidr honey.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Sineguelas

Small plum-like tropical fruits eaten by the handful — thin skin over sweet-tart yellow flesh clinging to a big pit, a beloved Philippine and Latin American summer snack.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Sloe

The small, fiercely astringent blue-black fruit of the blackthorn hedge — inedible raw, but the soul of sloe gin. Britain and Europe's classic autumn foraging fruit, best picked after the first frost.

Stone fruit Autumn

Snake gourd

The gourd that grows into a two-metre coiling snake unless a stone is tied to its end — mild, faintly nutty and a monsoon staple across South Asia, where the shape is a practical problem rather than a curiosity.

Melon Summer Autumn

Snot apple

An unglamorously-named but beloved southern African fruit — a woody capsule whose sticky, mucilaginous flesh is chewed for its sweetness like natural gum. A hardy savanna tree fruit and a cherished childhood snack across the region, mucus-like texture and all.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Soncoya

The rugged giant of the custard-apple family — a brown, hook-covered fruit the size of a grapefruit hiding fragrant orange pulp that tastes of mango and papaya. A rustic Central American cousin of soursop and cherimoya, usually drunk rather than spooned.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Sour plum

A bright red-to-orange African fruit as sharply sour as its name promises — thin-fleshed, tart, and refreshing, gathered from thorny savanna shrubs and made into juices, jams, and drinks, with a prized oil pressed from its seed.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Soursop

The tropics' creamiest sour fruit — a spiky green giant whose white pulp tastes like strawberry-pineapple custard with citrus lightning. The soul of Latin sorbets and Filipino juice stands alike.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Spaghetti squash

The squash that falls apart into strands. Roast it and the flesh separates into pale, noodle-like threads on its own — a genuine botanical oddity that made it the default low-carbohydrate pasta substitute.

Melon Autumn Winter

Star apple

Cut this glossy purple globe crosswise and a translucent star appears — hence the name. Its milky, sweet flesh made it a beloved dooryard fruit from the Caribbean to the Philippines, where merienda under a kaimito tree is childhood itself.

Tropical & subtropical Winter Spring

Starfruit

The fruit that slices into stars — waxy golden ridges, crisp grape-citrus flesh, and zero prep beyond a knife. A garnish celebrity that's genuinely good eating, with one serious kidney-health caveat.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Strawberry

The world's favorite berry — a rose-family hybrid whose seeds sit on the outside, whose peak-season perfume defines "fruity," and whose highland farms bring temperate sweetness to the tropics.

Berry Winter Spring

Strawberry guava

A small red guava that tastes genuinely of strawberry, eaten skin and all in a single bite — and simultaneously one of the most destructive invasive plants in the Pacific, where it has swallowed whole Hawaiian forests.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Strawberry tree fruit

A round, red, warty-skinned fruit of a Mediterranean evergreen — soft, sweet-mild, and faintly gritty, ripening in autumn as the tree simultaneously flowers. Eaten fresh but famous distilled into Portugal's fiery medronho and Italian corbezzolo honey.

Berry Autumn

Sudachi

Tokushima's golf-ball citrus, picked hard and green and squeezed over almost everything. Sharper and more herbal than lime, it's the taste of Japanese autumn — grilled fish, matsutake mushrooms, and soba all wait for it.

Citrus Summer Autumn

Sugar palm fruit

The translucent, chewy seed-fruit of the sugar palm — sold as kaong or kolang-kaling, boiled and sweetened for halo-halo and festive sweets across Southeast Asia. The same palm gives one of the region's finest sugars.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Sugar-apple

The knobby little custard grenade — scaly segments that pull apart into spoonfuls of perfumed, pear-custard sweetness around slick black seeds. The Philippines' beloved atis, best eaten with your hands.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Surinam cherry

A ribbed, pumpkin-shaped little fruit that ripens from green through orange to deep crimson-black — sweet-tart and resinous, the beloved pitanga of Brazilian backyards.

Berry Spring Summer

Sweet lime

A pale-green citrus that looks like a lime but tastes barely sour — a mild, sweetish, low-acid juice fruit that fuels roadside juice stalls across India as mosambi, and grows around the Mediterranean as limetta.

Citrus Winter Spring

Tamarillo

An egg-shaped, jewel-toned relative of the tomato — tangy, savoury-sweet flesh with an edible skin best peeled, eaten spooned from the shell or cooked into chutneys across the Andes and New Zealand.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Tamarind

The sour engine of half the world's cuisines — a legume pod whose sticky brown pulp powers sinigang, pad thai, agua de tamarindo, Worcestershire sauce, and chutneys across four continents.

Tropical & subtropical Spring Summer

Tampoi

A round, velvety brown-to-pink fruit of the Bornean rainforest — crack the thick rind and translucent white or yellow segments spill out, sweet-sour and juicy like a larger, richer rambai. A cherished wild and dooryard fruit of the Malay world.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Tangelo

A juicy citrus hybrid of tangerine and grapefruit (or pomelo) — loose-skinned and easy to peel like a mandarin, but bigger, tarter, and gushing with juice, often with a distinctive "bell" neck.

Citrus Winter

Tayberry

A Scottish blackberry-raspberry cross bred in 1979 and named for the River Tay — a long, cone-shaped red-purple berry with an intense aromatic sweetness that fruit lovers rate above either parent.

Berry Summer

Teaberry

A small, bright-red berry of a low woodland groundcover in eastern North America — crisp and mild with an unmistakable minty wintergreen flavor. The original source of "teaberry" ice cream and gum, and a traditional forest nibble that persists all winter under the snow.

Berry Autumn Winter

Tejocote

The little golden hawthorn of the Mexican highlands, essential to Christmas — no ponche navideño is legal without it. Crab-apple tart and aromatic, it simmers into the holiday and candies into rielitos the rest of the year.

Pome Autumn Winter

Tendu

The sweet golden fruit of an Indian ebony tree — a wild persimmon relative, honey-sweet when fully ripe, astringent before. A cherished forest fruit of central India, from a tree whose leaves wrap the country's bidi cigarettes and whose wood is true ebony.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Thimbleberry

A soft, velvety red bramble berry shaped like a thimble — intensely flavored but so fragile it can't be sold, making its famous jam a hand-picked delicacy of Michigan's Upper Peninsula and the Pacific Northwest.

Berry Summer

Tomatillo

A green, husk-wrapped fruit at the heart of Mexican cooking — tart, firm, and bright, the essential base of salsa verde. A Physalis cousin of the cape gooseberry, but savory and cooked rather than sweet, and central to Mexican cuisine since Aztec times.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Tomato

Botanically a fruit, legally a vegetable (US Supreme Court, 1893), culturally indispensable — the Andean berry that conquered every cuisine on earth and became the world's most-grown "vegetable."

Berry Summer Year-round

Trifoliate orange

A downy, golf-ball-sized yellow citrus from a fiercely thorny, cold-hardy tree — intensely bitter, sour, and aromatic, inedible raw but made into marmalade and medicine, and the vital rootstock behind much of the world's commercial citrus.

Citrus Autumn

Tropical almond

The flat, almond-shaped fruit of a sprawling tropical beach tree — a thin layer of sweet-sour flesh over a hard stone whose kernel tastes just like an almond. A pantropical shade tree whose fruit is a nostalgic childhood forage across the tropics.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Tucumã

A vivid orange Amazonian palm fruit with dense, fibrous, oil-rich flesh — the beloved filling of Manaus's iconic X-caboquinho sandwich. Intensely carotene-rich, mildly savory-sweet, and eaten with tapioca and cheese across the Brazilian Amazon.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Ugni

A tiny maroon berry with an outsized aroma — sweet-tart and perfumed with strawberry, guava, and bubblegum — foraged in Chile and famous as Queen Victoria's reputed favourite fruit.

Berry Autumn

Umari

An Amazonian fruit with buttery, oily, yellow-orange flesh so rich it's spread on bread like butter — aromatic and savory-sweet, eaten with cassava across the western Amazon. A "vegetable butter" of the rainforest, unique and little-known beyond it.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Umbu

The "sacred tree of the backlands" bears this lime-green, juicy-tart fruit through the droughts of Brazil's caatinga — thanks to water-storing roots. Umbu means "the one that gives drink," and the milkshake-like umbuzada proves it daily.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Ume

Japan's green "plum" that is botanically closer to an apricot — and almost never eaten raw. Salted into umeboshi, steeped into umeshu, or simmered into syrup, ume turns mouth-puckering acidity into some of Asia's most beloved preserved flavors.

Stone fruit Spring Summer

Uvaia

A soft, juicy, pear-shaped yellow fruit of Brazil's Atlantic forest — intensely aromatic and sweet-tart, so thin-skinned and delicate it bruises in the hand, making it a backyard treasure rarely sold in shops.

Tropical & subtropical Spring Summer

Velvet tamarind

A small, hard-shelled black fruit that cracks to reveal a thin coat of orange-brown, powdery, sweet-sour pulp around a seed — a beloved snack across West Africa and Southeast Asia, sold by the bagful and sucked like a natural sweet-tart candy.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Wampee

A citrus-family curiosity from southern China that grows like grapes and peels like a loquat — brittle tan skin, translucent flesh, and a flavor between grapefruit, longan, and lemonade. Beloved in Guangdong, nearly unknown outside Asia.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Waterberry

A purple-black berry of a handsome waterside African tree — sweet-tart and slightly astringent, eaten fresh and brewed into a country wine. A cherished indigenous fruit of southern and eastern Africa's rivers and wetlands, and a favorite of birds and monkeys.

Tropical & subtropical Summer

Watermelon

Summer in fruit form — 92% water wrapped in a green rind, descended from the Kalahari Desert and perfected over 4,000 years into the world's juiciest thirst-quencher.

Melon Summer

Wax apple

A glossy, bell-shaped tropical fruit with the crunch of a watery apple and a light, refreshing sweetness — Southeast Asia's favorite hot-weather thirst-quencher, eaten skin and all.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Spring

White sapote

A citrus-family fruit that tastes nothing like citrus — custard-soft ivory flesh with flavors of banana, peach, and vanilla, and a long folk reputation as a sleep aid.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Wild custard apple

Africa's own member of the custard-apple family — a small, lumpy fruit that ripens from green to orange, with sweet, fragrant, pineapple-and-apricot flesh. A beloved wild food of the savanna, gathered by children across the continent.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Wild medlar

A round, apple-brown African fruit whose soft ripe pulp tastes of dried apple and dates — a beloved savanna snack across southern Africa, gathered from the wild, eaten fresh, and brewed into a traditional drink. No relation to the European medlar it resembles.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Wineberry

A glistening, bright-red bramble berry from East Asia, wrapped in sticky red-haired sheaths until it ripens — sweet-tart, juicy, and jewel-like, beloved by foragers even as it spreads invasively across parts of North America and Europe.

Berry Summer

Wood apple

A cannonball of a fruit from India and Sri Lanka — a grey, wood-hard shell you crack like a coconut, hiding brown, tamarind-ish pulp that smells fermented and tastes like sour caramel raisins. The base of one of South Asia's great market drinks.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Yangmei

China's knobbly crimson summer berry — a fruit of a thousand juice-filled beads around a single pit, tasting of strawberry, cranberry, and pine. So perishable it barely leaves the region where it fell, which is exactly why it inspires June pilgrimages.

Berry Summer

Yellow mombin

A small, tart, golden tropical fruit in the mango family — cajá to Brazilians, hog plum to the Caribbean — whose intensely aromatic pulp makes some of Latin America's most beloved juices, ice creams, and cocktails.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Yuzu

East Asia's aromatic winter citrus — a knobbly, seed-heavy fruit prized not for eating but for a rind and juice whose perfume outclasses lemon, lime, and mandarin combined.

Citrus Winter

Zucchini

The immature summer squash that took over the vegetable garden — mild, quick-cooking, and famously prolific. The same species as the pumpkin, simply picked weeks earlier, when the skin is still soft and the seeds have not formed.

Melon Summer