Few fruits carry the weight of centuries quite like the common fig. Ficus carica, native to the sun-soaked hills of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, has graced gardens and tables since biblical times, and no member of the tribe is more beloved in the American South than 'Celeste', the little fig so sweet that growers have long called the tree the Sugar Fig.
Hardiness
Zones 7–10
Light
Full Sun
Height
6–12 ft.
Spread
8–15 ft.
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, topical applications, respiratory support
We are identifying this little-known fig as Ficus heterophylla thanks to Tony Avent of Plant Delights, who was most likely the source of the cuttings we originally started with. The species name means different leaves, and the plant lives up to the promise: juvenile foliage may be lobed and wandering in outline, while the mature leaves settle into dark green, pointed, slightly heart-shaped blades carried on handsome red petioles. A faint sweetness hangs about the shrub, and the long, almost vine-like branches lend the whole plant a loose, scrambling grace.
Ficus nipponica is a handsome evergreen climbing fig from Japan and temperate East Asia, a self-clinging vine that dresses walls, masonry, and tree trunks in glossy green the year round. Where the familiar creeping fig, Ficus pumila, carries small rounded leaves, this rarer relative bears larger, more pointed foliage and a somewhat tougher constitution. Botanists now file the plant under the sprawling Ficus sarmentosa complex, as Ficus sarmentosa var. nipponica, though it remains best known to gardeners by the older name.
Figvine is very unlike the common edible fig (Ficus carica). This evergreen climber wears small, fingernail-sized rounded leaves and is most often seen scaling masonry walls, where a fringe of tiny aerial rootlets grips the roughest stone and brick. Given time, the creeping fig will trace a wall in intricate green patterns or blanket the surface entirely in a flat, dense sheet, one of the finest self-clinging covers for a shaded or partly shaded wall in a warm garden.
In the forests of the Himalayan foothills and across monsoon Asia grows a fig of ancient bearing, Ficus roxburghii, known to botanists today as Ficus auriculata and to gardeners as the elephant-ear fig. This is no dainty exotic. In the tropics the plant makes a bold small tree; in the American South, where hard frost cuts back the top, the fig returns from the root each year as a heroic perennial, with a presence as memorable as a live oak draped in Spanish moss.
The Latin gives away the joke before you have even seen the plant. Ficus vaccinioides, the Formosan creeping fig, is a fig that has decided to impersonate a blueberry: vaccinioides means resembling Vaccinium, and the small, glossy, obovate leaves running close along reddish stems really could pass for an evergreen huckleberry. They are no relation at all. They are a true fig, latex and all, just one that has shrunk to a few inches tall and given up any ambition of climbing.
