Pawpaws: Missouri’s State Fruit

A fourth-grade civics lesson at St. Louis-based New City School in 2019 resulted in the pawpaw (Asimina triloba) earning designation as Missouri’s official fruit tree.

Missourians who might easily recognize bluebirds, dogwoods, black walnuts, and honeybees — the official state bird, tree, nut, and insect — may not be able to pick the pawpaw tree out of an arboreal line-up, let alone recognize its fruit. But pawpaw trees are plentiful in their natural habitat of rich bottomland soils along streams, on moist slopes, in ravines, and at the base of wooded bluffs, environments that occur in great swaths of Missouri’s landscape.

Pawpaws are the only descendent of the mostly tropical Annonaceae, or custard apple, family that have evolved to thrive in temperate North America. The tree’s 6- to 12-inch long, 3- to 5-inch wide, dangling, lance-shaped leaves are among the last to emerge in the spring forest, an adaptation that has almost certainly contributed to its successful integration into USDA hardiness zones 5 to 9. In autumn, the tree’s exotic leaves are golden yellow in the forest landscape.

“Pawpaw trees are easy to identify. They look like a tropical plant,” said MDC Community Forester Ann Koenig. “Smelling a crushed leaf is a dead giveaway. It smells more like green pepper than green peppers do.

“I absolutely love the flowers in the spring. There’s nothing else that looks like them in bloom.”

Pawpaw blooms emerge before leaves make an appearance in late April and early May. At first small and green, blooms mature into bell-shaped flowers with six recurved petals in a rich burgundy color. These sturdy blossoms emit a fetid odor that attracts the carrion beetles and flies that pollinate them. Not the most efficient of pollinators, a novel and interesting solution used by commercial growers to increase fruit set is to hang a dead animal carcass — or roadkill — from the tree’s branches to lure them in greater numbers.

Koenig suggested that spring bloom surveillance forays into the woods could make fall pawpaw foraging trips more successful.

Pollinated blooms produce pale green fruits that grow singly or in small clusters. Shaped somewhat like a kidney bean, they mature to the size of potatoes, making them the largest native American fruit species.

Ripening in September and October, fruits may or may not change color. Some variants turn a lighter green and even display a yellowing. Fully ripe fruits soften and give off a distinctive fruity aroma, eventually falling from the tree. A gentle squeeze that leaves a slight indent indicates ripeness but use caution. Fruits bruise easily. And unless very close to maturity, pawpaws will not further ripen once picked. Ripe fruits often exhibit some browning and there are those who are most fond of them the darker they get.

Within its smooth green skin, pawpaw’s creamy white to pale yellow or orange flesh surrounds several large brown seeds. Flavor varies among varieties, and some native pawpaws should be tossed instead of tasted. But when they are good, they are very good with a complex flavor most often likened to some combination of banana, mango, and pineapple. With only a two-day shelf-life, fruits will keep for up two or three weeks if refrigerated. Pulp can be frozen for later use.

Pawpaw foragers must be vigilant to beat opossums, raccoons, foxes, squirrels, and black bears to the fat fruits that certainly must be a favored delicacy in woodland diets. Pawpaw’s most welcome “pest” is the zebra swallowtail butterfly that lays its eggs on the undersides of the trees young leaves. Pawpaws are the exclusive larval host for the striking black-and-white butterflies.

Reaching mature heights of 15 feet, and occasionally growing up to 30 feet, pawpaws tend to grow in colonies, spreading by underground roots. Because they are not self-fertile, pollen from a tree from outside the colony is necessary to produce fruit, which further explains why entire groves of trees are sometimes devoid of pawpaws.

“I’ve seen thousands of pawpaw trees but only a few fruits,” Koenig said.

Ancient History, Names, and Brushes with Fame

In Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit, author Andrew Moore writes that fossil records indicate pawpaw’s ancestors were growing in North America in the Eocine, 56 million years ago. The plants’ irresistible sweet, fleshy fruits resulted in prehistoric megafauna enthusiastically dining on them and efficiently dispersing the seeds. A couple of ice sheets and hundreds of thousands of years later, Asimina triloba remained the only member of a 2,000 species family to have adapted to frozen winters. Pawpaws are indigenous to 26 states in the eastern and midwestern United States.

The earliest known Native American archeological sites show that humans seasonally dined on pawpaws in large quantities. Their fondness for the fruits was responsible for the trees’ broader dispersal as they moved and migrated “carrying seeds in satchels rather than their stomachs,” observed Moore. He noted that a modern map with large numbers of pawpaw place names is a testament to the tree’s popularity and spread.

Early American settlers most certainly encountered and enjoyed pawpaws, but the first solid written evidence of the edible fruits appeared in 1612 when Jamestown colonist William Strachey wrote about “assessemin,” from the Powhatan word assimin, in reference to pawpaws, which he called wheat plums.

Englishman John Lawson referred to the fruit as a papau in A New Voyage to Carolina in 1709. Many names were attributed to the widespread fruit, often misidentified as a type of papaya. Linnaeus assigned pawpaws with their current recognized classification in 1753.

Over the years any number of colorful regional names have been coined to identify pawpaws including Missouri banana, Hoosier banana, hillbilly mango, and banago, among many others.

Historical records indicate that Daniel Boone enjoyed pawpaws, both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson ate, grew, and shared them, and in 1806, William Clark journaled about their critical role in the Lewis and Clark expedition: “Our party out of provisions. Subsisting on poppaws.”

Pawpaw fruits also were welcome and nutritional repast in the meager diets of Civil War soldiers and enslaved persons.