About the Tree — PawpawSeeds.com
History, botanical quirks, Native American use, and why this tree matters
Asimina triloba produces the largest fruit of any tree native to North America. Individual fruits can weigh over a pound in named cultivars. There's no other native fruit that comes close in size.
Pawpaw is in the family Annonaceae — the custard apple family. Nearly every other member of this family is tropical: cherimoya, soursop, guanabana, custard apple. Pawpaw is the only significant temperate member, and the only one adapted to survive hard winters in zone 5.
Multiple Native American tribes across the Ohio Valley, mid-Atlantic, and Great Lakes regions relied on pawpaw as a seasonal food source. The Iroquois, Delaware, Cherokee, and others all had uses for the fruit — eaten fresh, dried, or incorporated into porridge and breads. Seeds and bark were used medicinally and for insecticidal purposes. Pawpaw cultivation and movement of seeds by humans significantly extended the tree's range beyond its purely natural distribution.
The Corps of Discovery's journals document eating pawpaw during the 1806 return journey from the Pacific. Short on food at one point in the fall, they relied on wild pawpaw as a primary food source for several days. Meriwether Lewis wrote about "the pappaw" in entries that September.
Pawpaw has a 2–3 day shelf life at room temperature. The modern commercial food system requires fruit that can spend 1–3 weeks in refrigerated transit and then sit on a shelf for additional days. Pawpaw categorically fails this requirement. It was a local, seasonal food — valuable to people who lived near it, invisible to everyone else. The industrialization of food distribution effectively eliminated it from common knowledge.
Unlike most fruit trees, pawpaw is not pollinated by bees. The flowers produce a slightly fetid scent and are pollinated primarily by carrion flies and beetles. This unusual pollination ecology is part of why pawpaw fruit set can be unreliable — the pollinators it needs are less abundant in manicured garden settings than in natural landscapes.
The leaves, bark, and seeds of pawpaw contain acetogenins — potent compounds toxic to many insects and herbivores. Deer avoid the foliage. Most common orchard pests leave it alone. Historically, pawpaw leaves were used as insect repellent: laid in a bed to repel fleas, or worn in hats to repel insects during field work.
Pawpaw seeds and bark contain annonacin, an acetogenin that in high concentrations has been associated with neurological effects in animal studies. The seeds should not be eaten. The fruit pulp contains trace amounts, but at normal consumption levels this is not considered a health concern. Don't eat the seeds — they cause nausea at minimum.
It's often claimed that George Washington served chilled pawpaw as a favorite dessert at Mount Vernon. The attribution is disputed and probably apocryphal, but pawpaw was certainly well known in the colonial and early American period throughout the Virginia and Maryland region where it grows abundantly.
The American folk song "Paw Paw Patch" dates to the 19th century and reflects how common and familiar the tree was in rural American life. Children collected pawpaws in fall — the "picking up pawpaws, putting 'em in a basket" in the song refers to collecting fallen ripe fruit, which was the primary harvest method before it was understood that fallen fruit is usually bruised.
Pre-stratified seeds from our Pennsylvania orchard. Susquehanna and Allegheny cultivars. Ready to plant this spring.
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