Paw Paw (Asimina triloba)

This post explores the many gifts offered by Paw Paw trees the in the context of Food Forest Design. This is Installment #6 of the Stacking Functions in the Garden, Food Forest and Medicine Cabinet series.

Pawpaw is an unbelievable tree and fruit. Imagine a fruit the size of a mango, that smells like the most exotic tropical fruit. Cutting it in half reveals an incredibly sweet, rich, custard-textured flesh that has a flavor profile somewhere between banana, papaya, pear, strawberry and jackfruit. And you picked it from a tree on YOUR land! For our region, where winters can get to -26 C and heavy winds, it is a very special experience to have such a tropical seeming tree. The foliage and bark are not desired by deer or rabbits, so we find we can plant paw paw out with no browse pressure.

The pawpaw is a cousin to the custard apple and cherimoya, the only member of the tropical sugar apple family living in the temperate north. Basically, the pawpaw is a tropical fruit tree that hitchhiked its way north as the continental glaciers receded at the end of the Ice Age. The pawpaw is now found growing indigenously, primarily throughout the eastern United States and very southern part of Ontario. This amazingly adaptive fruit tree has become so popular that it is being introduced into many other temperate regions of the globe.

Paw Paw is an underappreciated and under-recognized tree. Within the bushcraft and permaculture circles, it is quite well known as an amazing tree to find, plant, and tend.

One of the reasons that PawPaw is probably not more well known has, unsurprisingly, everything to do with the commercial viability of the fruits. PawPaw fruit is absolutely delicious but it only stays good for a few days after picking–so it would never survive the rigors of modern industrial agriculture. You can occasionally find it at a good farmer’s market, and it is well worth seeking out! You can also seek it out in the wilds. PawPaw is the only large fruit producing tree that grows wild in a north-eastern climate.

This leads to the names for the PawPaw, which includes everything from Appalacian banana, Michigan Banana, Ozark Banana, Kentucky Banana, West Virginia Banana, to American custard apple, Quaker delight, hillbilly mango, and poor man’s banana. As you can see from some of these names, a bit of a stigma was once attached to PawPaw, which may be another reason it is not as sought out or well known. Such are the long term impacts of the type of food snobbery and big ag propaganda that I touched on in this radio segment.

To learn more about the many blessings Pawpaw trees offer to the land, human beings and the non-human beings we share this land with read more in the article below:

https://gavinmounsey.substack.com/p/paw-paw-asimina-triloba