After-school sale
“Today, tomorrow, or Sunday?” 9-year-old pawpaw entrepreneur Onyx Terran asked the girl at the front of the line on a Friday in September outside the Blacksburg New School.
“Huh?” the girl asked, “What do you mean?”
Onyx, his faint freckles gold in the afternoon sun, explained, “Do you want to eat it today, tomorrow, or Sunday?”
Pawpaws, it turns out, have only about 24 hours of optimal ripeness. In addition to a short shelf life, pawpaw fruits have a short growing season, popping up on pawpaw trees for only a few weeks in late summer or early fall. Softer than mangoes but similar in heft, pawpaws are also hard to ship.
The logistical hurdles of getting pawpaws onto grocery shelves may explain why, at age 44, despite spending the majority of my life in Virginia, one of pawpaw’s prime, native growing regions, I had never eaten — nor even seen, to my knowledge — pawpaw.
Hence, I devoted three weeks in September to find, taste and understand pawpaw. Unlike me, Onyx has been eating pawpaw fruits since he was a toddler. His earliest pawpaw memory is slurping freshly fallen pawpaws with his friends, in his backyard, in his hot tub.
Birthday Pawty
“Why I like to sell pawpaws to Big Lick is because they give us free ice cream,” Onyx told me.
Big Lick Ice Cream Co. owner Lindsay Lindberg says that it takes about two pounds of pawpaw to make 24 pints (or three gallons) of pawpaw ice cream. Lindsay and her husband, Nathan, have been selling their handcrafted ice cream, ice cream sandwiches (“sammies”) and popsicles at the Blacksburg Farmers Market (the “market” from here on out) since 2011.
When the Lindbergs first made pawpaw ice cream, they ordered frozen pulp from a farm in Ohio that Nathan’s aunt Amy had told them about.
Now they buy their pawpaw from Onyx.
But in the coming years, they hope to harvest pawpaw from the ten pawpaw trees they’re painstakingly raising in their own orchard. This year my family celebrated my father’s 72nd birthday with a pint of Big Lick’s dairy-free pawpaw ice cream, plus their ginger pawpaw sammies. It was a new age of flavor for all of us.
Commode
“Pawpaw ice cream is popular,” said Lindsay Lindberg, her long thick hair pulled back in a low ponytail. “But people are very unfamiliar with it. People ask if it’s a dog ice cream since the name has paw in it.”
Nevertheless, Big Lick’s ginger pawpaw sammies sold out before the ginger coconut sammies at this year’s Yogajam festival in Floyd. “People were asking for it even when we took it off the sign.”
Onyx’s favorite Big Lick flavor is a tie between chocolate and Oreo. He rates Big Lick pawpaw ice cream as 9 out of 10. “10 out of 10,” Onyx declared, on a recent Wednesday evening, are pawpaws fresh from one of the two tall, lush pawpaw trees in his backyard.
Onyx — who’s known at school for wearing tie-dye shirts every day and goes by the nickname Barnacle for reasons no one knows — looped one end of a black rope around his waist. The other end of the rope disappeared up into the pawpaw canopy. Onyx leaned back in the loop. He slightly shifted his weight up and down.
Thud, thud, thud, thud, thud, CLANK.
“Toilet shot!” Onyx laughed. A pawpaw had plopped right into a white commode propped against the trunk of one of the pawpaw trees.
Dendrology
I learned that pawpaw was scheduled for the second week of John Seiler’s dendrology lab at Virginia Tech. And this happened to be the second week.
Virginia Tech’s academic catalogue officially lists dendro as “Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation 2324 (FREC 2324): Field identification of trees of North America with particular emphasis on trees native to the Eastern United States.” One tree native to the Eastern United States — including Virginia — is pawpaw.
The Pawpaw Belt stretches from Florida to Pennsylvania and Maryland to Missouri. Pawpaw trees produce an oblong, sweet green fruit that Lindsay Lindberg sometimes calls the Appalachian mango.
Who knew that the largest edible fruit indigenous to North America is tropical?
Ephemeral
In blue jeans and running shoes, Seiler hands a palm-size first aid kit to Brenna Kurtz, one of his three graduate teaching assistants. Kurtz is a second-year master’s student whose rolled-up cuffs of forest green pants reveal black hiking boots.
Seiler divides the students into three groups that take off in different directions across campus. I join the group led by Seiler and Kurtz. Last April, Seiler, who is in his 60s, ran the Promise Land 50K, finishing the 31.1 miles through the Blue Ridge Mountains in 8 hours, 57 minutes and 39 seconds.
He has to remind the undergrads to keep up with him as he leads them from one tree to the next, across campus, all afternoon. This section of dendro meets every Tuesday from 2-4:50 p.m. Today, Seiler peels off early for a guest lecturing gig. Kurtz takes over.
About two hours into class, I’ve shed my sweatshirt. A student in bubble gum pink yoga pants and white tube top wipes her cheek — which now matches her pants — and bundles her strawberry blond hair into a limp knot on top of her head. The 20 students and I follow Kurtz past the Duck Pond and up the shady slope beyond the amphitheater. “How many trees have we done?” one student whispers to another who is skimming the syllabus trying to calculate how many are left.
At 4:42 p.m. — nearly three hours into the tree tour — we arrive at the 12th tree. It’s the next to last tree. It’s the pawpaw.
Supposedly, this is the only pawpaw tree on campus. But you can find hundreds of them along the Pawpaw Trail near Salem or Andy Layne Trail along Catawba Creek. Whether or not you find even one pawpaw fruit is another story.
Kurtz gives the students a trick for identifying pawpaws: “The leaves are shaped like hound dog ears, and hound dogs have paws … so it’s a pawpaw.” We stare at the dark green, oblong leaves. Kurtz, who earned her undergraduate degree at Liberty University and speaks without notes or PowerPoint slides, reels off the facts: Pawpaws like moist coves, are part of the tropical fruit family, aren’t in grocery stores because they ripen so quickly, and can upset your stomach. “Any questions?”
A student points a stick at a thick fringe of dog-ear leaves — “There’s one.” Hanging from the thin branch about three feet above our heads is a single fruit. It looks like a bloated lima bean.
Folklore
“Every tree should have a short description,” Seiler announces in front of a dawn redwood.
He says it again at the big tooth aspen and then at the sweetgum and once more at the sassafras tree, where he pulls out a pocketknife. He slices off a few twigs and invites us to do the same. A few students step forward with their own knives. The first aid kit remains tucked in Kurtz’s knapsack. Seiler holds the sassafras twigs to his nose. He inhales deeply.
“They taste like fresh Fruit Loops. I eat them every year at the beach,” he says and pours the twigs from his hand into a student’s. Since Seiler had to leave early for the guest lecture, I emailed him after class to ask for his short description of pawpaw. He wrote back:
Pawpaw leaves look like the ears of a hound dog but have the smell of green pepper when crushed. The buds are known as a naked bud and are a flexible, soft fuzzy golden brown color. The buds actually change color as you move them around in the light. The fruit is a stubby banana with big seeds. It tastes like a combination of a banana and some citrus … very tropical. Pawpaw are mentioned in the original “Jungle Book” movie. When Baloo the bear is teaching Mowgli (the kid) how to find food in the jungle, he says, “When you pick the fruit of the prickle pear use your claw not your paw … when you pick the fruit of the pawpaw use your paw” or something to that effect.
Finding Disney’s pawpaw reference proved easier than finding an actual pawpaw fruit: Just look up “Bare Necessities” on YouTube and pay attention approximately 68 seconds into the song.
Notably, Disney’s animators lived up to their Imagineer moniker: Their depiction of a pawpaw as a cantaloupe-sized yellow globe looks nothing like the green fruits you’ll find in the New River Valley.
The pawpaw fruits in our Virginia understory — the part of the forest that’s beneath the canopy — often grow high in the trees, far beyond the reach of paws or claws. If you’re out in the woods without a ladder, how do you get the fruits down? That sort of knowledge and skill about pawpaw foraging, according to Virginia Tech associate professor of public humanities Danille Christensen, qualifies as folklore.
Christensen and I are standing beneath one of the pawpaw trees she’s grown in her backyard. She had greeted me at her front door in socks and led me downstairs through the walk-out basement, where she stepped into slip-on shoes before giving me a tour of her yard. Christensen’s voice is soft but clear; her yard woodsy and intentional. As a folklorist who teaches courses in food studies and Appalachian studies, Christensen studies “the patterned things people make, say, and do in everyday life to communicate who they are, what they value, and where they belong.”
Guilty
“Don’t. Shake. The. Tree.”
It’s the loudest Barbara Rosholdt speaks on our 90-minute phone call. Rosholdt, a rare breed and seed saver who the North American Pawpaw Growers Association identifies as a regional pawpaw expert, didn’t taste her first pawpaw until she was about 47.
Her first taste came in 2001 at a conference in Kentucky. She won the door prize: a pawpaw seedling. She planted the seedling, but it didn’t fruit until eight years later after she had “squirreled away” and planted seeds from other pawpaw tastings. Now, in 2025, she has about 16 trees.
Over the phone, what she tells me about growing pawpaws is that when you plant the seeds that you have been keeping moist in a bag with peat moss for 17 weeks in the refrigerator, “You sing them a little song, you put them in the soil and say a little prayer and then in the spring protect them from lawnmower blight.”
Thinking about the Jungle Book, I ask what song she sings. “I just think nice thoughts like,” — she interrupts herself to sigh. She lowers her voice, “Okay, pawpaws, now, grow nicely, have a good time, let me know if you need anything…and I’m going to go away and I generally stay away because I don’t want to step on them.”
Like Rosholdt, Lindberg of Big Lick has raised her trees from seeds. She started the process back in 2021, and, as Rosholdt described, stratified the seeds in the fridge. “Most people would’ve given up,” she said. It takes seven to eight years for pawpaws to bear fruit. Even then, trees won’t produce fruit unless you have two trees from different parent trees. This fall is the first time that Danille Christensen’s oldest pawpaw tree has fruit.
Eventually, my Mission ImPAWssible would include a festival — the Dobbins Hollow Winery Pawpaw Festival in Pilot, Virginia. The festival had more wine, face painting, and goats than pawpaws. Fortunately, in the days before the festival, I had been foraging for fruit on the Pawpaw Trail along the Roanoke River. I was so excited when I spied a pawpaw that I accepted the offer of a women I didn’t know to hold my dachshund’s leash so I could scamper down the slope to the tree.
I grasped the trunk in between my hands and shook the daylights — the delights? — out of it. THUD: one pawpaw.
Hillbilly
“What is this?” I asked on Instagram alongside a photo of the pawpaw I’d found.
A Pennsylvanian who can do a one-arm handstand messaged me back: “Pawpaw?” And then continued: “It’s common around here. Kinda like a hillbilly fruit. I ate it once not too long ago. Parts of it are poisonous, so you gotta be careful.”
At this point, I’d learned that pawpaws go by many names including bandango, custard apple, poor man’s banana, fetid bush, Hoosier banana, and, less often, Asimina triloba, its scientific name with the asimina deriving from Native American language and triloba referring to pawpaws’ tendency to grow in a cluster of three fruits. But I hadn’t heard or read the name “hillbilly fruit.”
I immediately wondered if a stigma towards “hillbilly” culture would be one reason that pawpaws haven’t made it into grocery stores as have other easy-to-bruise, quick-ripening fruits like peaches and avocados.
Avocados, according to Adam D’Angelo, the 27-year-old director of research at Project Pawpaw who fell in love with Roanoke when he hiked the Appalachian Trail, are an apt case study for pawpaws. Avocado consumption in the U.S. soared from approximately 1.5 pounds per person a year in the late 1990s to more than 8 pounds per person in 2018. Today, 90% of the avocados in U.S. grocery stores are imported from Mexico.
D’Angelo believes that domestic pawpaws can also achieve commercial success if people like him optimize three factors — tree-to-market logistics, new pawpaw varieties, and consumer education. Neither D’Angelo nor Rosholdt think stigma is the issue.
“It’s shipping,” said Rosholdt. “And hillbilly is sort of in right now,” laughed D’Angelo over the phone. To take my phone call, he had pulled into a rest stop along the highway. He was driving to an international pawpaw conference in Kentucky — a conference Rosholdt was also heading to.
Indigenous
My handstanding friend messaged me, “ha! sorry, I just meant a fruit popular among hillbillies probably because my mom is from the middle of nowhere and she’s all about the paw paw.”
Stigma or not, I realize I’m uncomfortable even typing the word “hillbilly.” Over 20 years ago, I took my “y’alls” and “tomatuhs” and “mamas” with me when I moved from Danville to the Chicago area for college. “Where are you from!?!” my suitemates asked. They acted shocked that someone with a Southern accent — a “hillbilly” accent, perhaps — could get into journalism school. Two decades later, I couldn’t help but wonder if a fruit that’s popular (“pawpular”) in Appalachia would get the side-eye from city dwellers with urbane tastes.
Indeed, Christensen, in her Folklore in Appalachia Course, discusses “value and why certain things are dismissed or ignored or go under the radar and then other times they really show up in popular culture.”
We’re talking in the sun-dappled, woodsy oasis of Christensen’s backyard. She mentions the “romantic appeal” of something authentically folksy, like a pawpaw. Current appeal or not, at various points in America there has been stigma about pawpaws. The foreword of Andrew Moore’s fact-cramming, entertaining 2015 book Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit explains how some early Americans saw pawpaws as “fit only for ‘Negroes and Indians.’”
Historically, enslaved African Americans and Native Americans used pawpaws for many purposes including food (they have about 80 calories per serving and more niacin, calcium, magnesium, phosphorous, zinc, copper, manganese, and iron than bananas, apples, or oranges) and folk medicine (they contain natural compounds with cell-killing properties). Pawpaw seeds have even been found in Meadowcroft Rockshelter, a rock overhang in Pennsylvania where prehistoric hunters and gatherers lived 19,000 years ago.
But pawpaws far pre-date hunters and gatherers. Moore writes that they’ve been growing in North America for 56 million years. And, according to the Digital Atlas of the Virginia Flora, they’re native to all the counties where I had been looking — Montgomery, Roanoke and Giles.
Jiggle
“The time to pick them is when they have some give,” Rosholdt instructs me.
She likens it to picking peaches. When the fruit starts to dent with the slightest pressure — when “they have some give” — they may be close to ripe.
Ripe pawpaws will drop from the trees on their own or fall with the slightest breeze. That’s why you don’t shake the tree: If you do, you may knock off fruits that aren’t ripe yet. If you eat unripe pawpaws, you’re in for stomach issues.
And if you attempt to save unripe pawpaws until they have a little give, you may be disappointed. Most pawpaws picked before they’re ripe never have some give. They simply darken into purplish-black rocks and rot, never passing through the sweet custard phase.
Knowledge
“We’re going to need a bigger basket,” Onyx calls to Ava Pope, his mother, after he’s jiggled dozens of pawpaws from the tree.
He steps out of the rope loop, and we gather the pawpaws. We stack the ones for “tomorrow or the next day” in the wicker basket. The ones perfect for eating today (or yesterday), we line up in a single layer in a shallow plastic box.
Onyx, a baseball player whose favorite position is shortstop, chucks any black or bug-infested pawpaws all the way down the yard into Sinking Creek. I point out a particularly black, mashed one. The fruit is glooping out the sides as if the pawpaw has a sinus infection.
“That one might be too disgusting to pick up,” I say.
“Nothing is too disgusting for a caver,” replies Onyx before hurling the fruit into the creek.
Mike, Onyx’s father, is also a caver and planted the two pawpaw trees 25 years ago. Ava — like Lindsay Lindberg and Barbara Rosholdt and I — didn’t grow up eating pawpaws. But Danille Christensen and Adam D’Angelo did. Christensen remembers eating pawpaws at elementary school in Ohio. Her class would sing “Way Down Yonder in the Pawpaw Patch,” the American folk song printed at the beginning of Moore’s pawpaw book.
D’Angelo tasted his first pawpaw in 2009, at age 11, at Cornell University where his older brother went to school. D’Angelo took the seeds of his first pawpaw home to New Jersey, where he planted them in his parents’ yard. The trees from those seeds have provided the seedstock for the experimental pawpaw farms that D’Angelo has established in New Jersey, Wisconsin, and (coming soon) Georgia. He and the Project Pawpaw team aim to cultivate pawpaw varieties that could make it into grocery stores.
Instead of cultivating new varieties of pawpaw, Rosholdt is on a quest to find out how Native Americans preserved pawpaw fruits. That folk knowledge got lost along the way.
Labor Intensive
Onyx and I finish gathering the ripe pawpaws.
He introduces me to a spice bush, a plant not included in last week’s dendro lab. The crushed leaves smell like verbena — sparkly lemon with a dash of nutmeg.
Then Onyx teaches me how to gather eggs by opening the new hinged doors he and his father installed in the henhouse. He demonstrates how he climbs up into his tree fort. In the fort, he shows me his two pulley systems — one for communications (a walkie-talkie) and one for snacks. He holds up the knife he uses to mark time on the tree and (potentially) defend himself from the bobcat he and Ava heard screaming last night.
Ava brings me a large silver spoon to dip into a jar of their homemade maple syrup. Hands-down better than pawpaw: 15 out of 10. I lick the spoon and buy six pounds of the pawpaw that Onyx and I had gathered. But the gathering basket still brims with fruit.
Ava glances at Onyx, “What are we going to do with all these?” Later that night Ava texts me that Lindsay Lindberg from Big Lick is going to take them.
Earlier that day, I’d visited the Big Lick ice cream truck at the market. I bought a mini scoop of ultra-creamy nondairy pawpaw ice cream from Nathan, who was wearing a ballcap with handwritten letters that said “The Beginning is Near.” I didn’t find anyone else who had ordered pawpaw.
“With the pawpaw, I’d say the cost is considerable, but more than anything for us it’s the labor,” Lindsay Lindberg told me. Extracting each toxic seed from the custardy, edible fruit — the pulp — takes time, and makes a mess.
Mosquitoes
The pads of my fingertips pulsed to shake the tree. A cluster of three nearly yam-sized pawpaws hung from a branch 25 feet above my head.
I thought of Barbara. Don’t shake the tree.
The hum of insects and river water and distant traffic surrounded me.
Don’t shake the tree.
The world condensed into gold-flecked green.
Don’t shake the tree.
I tightened my grip on Rose’s leash. We took a few steps forward. I ducked under a branch, and there one was. Right in front of my face. Nose-level. It came off the tree into my palm almost as soon as I touched it. No tugging required. The pawpaw gods had rewarded my self-control. I found two dozen pawpaws in that patch.
And the mosquitoes found me.
Neurotoxic
My handstanding friend was right.
A research paper published in 2012 in the scientific journal Neurotoxicity reports that injecting annonacin from pawpaws into rats causes the rats’ brain cells to die. Annonacin is good at killing cells. This gives pawpaws high potential as an anti-cancer treatment, but also adds a degree of risk.
Experts, including Rosholdt and D’Angelo, say that the pulp — the fruit — is pretty safe. They emphasize that annonacin is primarily in the pawpaw bark, twigs, skin and seeds. Onyx loves sucking on pawpaw seeds, but D’Angelo thinks he should be okay as long as he’s not consuming the seeds or scraping them with his teeth.
Each pawpaw contains at least half a dozen dark seeds about the size of Brazil nuts. Removing all of the seeds from the pawpaw fruit is what makes processing pawpaws — for ice cream, for example — so time-consuming, and messy. Lindsay Lindsberg, in her steady, matter-of-fact tone, said, “They’re tricky.” Trickiness is another characteristic keeping pawpaws out of the grocery store.
Out of Hand
Onyx, Rosholdt, Christensen, and D’Angleo all declare that their favorite way to eat pawpaw is straight from the tree.
Second best for all of them (and best to Lindsberg who, like Onyx’s mother, Ava, isn’t wild about slurping plain pawpaw) is eating pawpaw in some sort of cold concoction, like ice cream or a milkshake.
For Rosholdt, the way to go — if pawpaw is out of season and she can’t have fruit fresh from the tree — is homemade sherbet. She makes it by mixing equal parts pawpaw pulp and coconut ice cream. I — at least, three weeks into my life with pawpaws — prefer a simple sorbet of frozen pawpaw pulp blended with a splash of cashew milk, dash of grated ginger and spoonful of honey. At my father’s birthday party, Dad and I had two servings. Mom and my husband, Steve, ate one.
No one got a stomachache.
Rosholdt and D’Angelo warn that baking pawpaws flattens the flavor. Plus, baking — or drying — pawpaws may concentrate the toxic compounds. The potential ramifications of drying pawpaw are one of the reasons Rosholdt is so keen to learn how indigenous communities preserved them. I intend to use every drop of my pawpaw pulp in the most delicious way possible. Therefore, I haven’t tried baking with it.
However, Onyx’s teacher brought his class pawpaw bread that she baked from Onyx’s crop. Onyx reported that it tasted good, kind of like banana bread. He also reported that he sold out of pawpaws on that Friday after-school sale.
“Everyone like them?” I asked.
“Yep, they love pawpaws,” he answered.
Onyx sells pawpaws for $4 per pound. He sold 115 pounds in fall 2024. So far in 2025, he’s sold about 100.
Pina colada
I had planned for Steve and me to take our first ever tastes of pawpaw together.
But there on the Pawpaw Trail, with a kiwi-sized pawpaw in hand, curiosity bested temperance.
I broke the fruit in half with my fingers. It tore apart as easily as a hard boiled egg. The smushy fruit inside looked several shades less gold than mango and several degrees more liquid than ripe avocado. It smelled tropical, sweet, citrusy.
“Okay, death by pawpaw,” I said to Rose and dabbed my tongue into the sunny goo. I wasn’t tasting the mango or banana flavors as pretty much everyone (in person and in books and on the internet) had described. Steve — when he tasted pawpaw later that afternoon — didn’t either. The first word that popped into Steve’s mind was alcoholic.
To him pawpaw tasted very sweet, but medicinal, almost fermented. Needless to say, he never dipped into my pawpaw stash in the fridge.
It wasn’t until Rosholdt told me that a pawpaw grower had cultivated a variety that tastes like pina colada that I remembered the Bahama Sno Shack. As a teenager in Danville in the 1990s, I could walk to the shack from our house in less than five minutes. I always ordered one of three flavors: blue raspberry, Bahama Mama (with neon blue, green, and yellow stripes), or pina colada.
I still haven’t consumed a real pina colada, but the Bahama Sno Shack pina colada is the closest I can come to describing how that first pawpaw tasted.
Quiz
“No phones. Stay out of the road. Make sure you guys are all out of the road,” Kurtz says to the class.
The students go into quiz mode. They stand still and silent, necks craned, eyes boring into a 20-foot specimen whose common and Latin names they are supposed to write down on their quiz sheets which Kurtz will check, one by one, before we hike to the next tree.
After class, inspired by Seiler’s edict to generate short descriptions of each tree, I started asking pawpaw folks what they would put on a billboard about pawpaws.
“America’s largest native fruit … and it grows right here,” Rosholdt replied.
D’Angelo’s billboard would say, “Eat fruit, not freight.”
Onyx went with, “They taste delicious. You cannot eat the skin. You’ll get a bellyache.”
Christensen paused, gazing into her backyard trees for about five seconds, “Try one while you can.”
I followed up by asking her to describe a pawpaw in as few words as possible. “Sweet tropical survivor,” she said.
And there, in her three-word epithet, you have the complicated character of pawpaws: The fruit doesn’t last long, but the trees themselves can take a licking. Literally, a licking: Christensen believes that it was one of her dogs that ate her pawpaw seedlings down to the ground one year.
The pawpaws came back up the next year.
River Trees
Christensen emailed me that she’d found pawpaws in East Montgomery Park along the Roanoke River. Lindsay Lindberg connected me to Ava Pope, and Pope invited me to her home to see Onyx’s pawpaw trees. Lindberg also told me about the pawpaw festival in Pilot, and Adam D’Angelo’s Project Pawpaw lists pawpaw festivals all over the Pawpaw Belt. Barbara Rosholdt did not hesitate to share her methods for stratifying seeds and raising pawpaw trees.
Neverthless, I asked D’Angelo if secrecy plays a role in pawpaw’s failure to make it commercially.
“I do run into gatekeeping … Pawpaws are having a moment in the DC area so there has been some overforaging. Trees are getting stripped, so some people might feel protective of them.”
Gatekeeping locations of wild pawpaw patches may be a conscious or unconscious attempt to preserve the value of pawpaw fruit. Christensen explains, “There are those who find pawpaws valuable because they’re inaccessible.”
Pawpaw fruits’ relative rarity and ephemerality make them precious. This preciousness has motivated some people to put pawpaws behind actual gates. For example, the forager who held Rose’s leash for me when I shook that tree on the Pawpaw Trail exclaimed that she’d just planted a pawpaw tree in her yard. Christensen, standing amid the kaleidoscopic greens and golds of her garden, describes how growing something valuable in your own space enriches and expands your life.
There’s the sensory pleasure of tasting the flavor of a pawpaw you grew.
There’s the intensified connection to nature that comes with “paying attention to the life cycle of the tree…” And there’s the fascinating, ineffable joy of “how beauty and use come together in everyday life.”
Stratification
One of George Washington’s favorite desserts was chilled pawpaw, and Thomas Jefferson thought enough of pawpaw to take pawpaw seeds to France. However, when the gardens of Mount Vernon and Monticello were replanted for modern tourism, pawpaw trees were left out.
And, in 2020 and 2021, a bill initiated by a youth scout group to designate pawpaws the official state fruit of Virginia didn’t pass.
At the Dobbins Winery Pawpaw Festival, the forager selling pawpaw fruit let me buy three pounds because sales had been slower than expected. When I tell folks around Blacksburg that I’ve found wild pawpaw fruits!, they skip over pawpaw and ask if they can pet Rose. Only about a third to a quarter of students in Christensen’s course taste-test fresh pawpaw if someone brings it to class.
Christensen, Rosholdt, D’Angelo, Pope and Lindberg each used the word “distinctive” when they described pawpaw flavor. They also all said that it’s a flavor people love or hate. The flavor I find exhilarating.
The texture — what some folks call custard and I call goop — grosses me out a bit.
Nonetheless, I’ve saved almost every seed from each pawpaw that’s come into my kitchen these three weeks. Inspired by Lindberg and informed by Rosholdt, I’m stratifying them. Today, if you open one of the crisper drawers in our spare fridge, you’ll find nearly 300 seeds wintering in ziplock bags. I haven’t decided where I’ll plant them.
Take a hike!
You can Google pawpaw year-round. There’s no shortage of digital fruit. At any time on the internet, you can
- read about pawpaw’s anti-cancer, anti-obesity and potentially neurotoxic effects in a 2024 scientific paper titled “North American pawpaw (Asimina triloba L.) fruit: A critical review of bioactive compounds and their bioactivities”;
- find thousands of pawpaw — sometimes confused with papaya — recipes, including a pawpaw pudding recipe published by The New York Times back in 2020;
- peruse various pawpaw growing guides, such as Virginia Cooperative Extension’s digital booklet, “Selecting Plants for Virginia Landscapes: Edible Landscape Species — Trees”;
- shop for pawpaw-print apparel including sundresses, Hawaiian shirts and bucket hats;
- or order frozen pawpaw pulp.
But now that the New River Valley’s pawpaw season is nearly over, you’ll have to wait until next September to feel the weight of a whole, ripe pawpaw fruit in your palm. If you want to know why my house smells like a tropical snow shack and why Christensen has a certain patch of dog-eared trees in her yard and why Onyx’s classmates buy pounds of pawpaw — take a walk. Take a walk next September along the Roanoke River or Sinking Creek. Go into the woods. Talk to someone before you head out so that you know where to go.
Understory
According to Kentucky State University — host of the pawpaw conference where D’Angelo and Rosholdt were headed — 27 varieties of pawpaw are available in America.
At Edible Landscaping in Afton, Virginia, the pawpaw varieties named after Virginia rivers are sold out. Potomac. Rappahannock. Shenandoah.
I don’t know what variety of pawpaws I’ve been eating the past few weeks. The creamy pulp on the inside has ranged from fluorescent yellow to gemstone gold to pale champagne. And the fruit size has varied from an apricot to a large baking potato.
Pawpaw tastes different when eaten on the trail versus standing in your kitchen. It’s different slurped straight from the skin (Onyx’s favorite method) or scooped with a long-handled silver spoon; different warm from the sun or cold on a cone.
Pawpaw cultivators, driven to grow the best pawpaw, carefully select seeds from fruits with intense flavor, optimal fruit-to-seed ratio, large size and resilience to bruising.
If I were to save seeds from only one pawpaw, I’d choose one of Onyx’s. Sinking Creek may not be an official variety, but it’s my favorite pawpaw so far.
Varieties
“Come again soon,” Onyx calls and waves as I back out of his driveway.
Dozens of pawpaws jostle in a cardboard box beside me. D’Angelo of Project PawPaw was right: “One of the most fulfilling aspects of pawpaw is that it connects the coolest people — passionate diverse people from all walks of life.”
Perhaps Onyx’s main motivation to invite me over is to put off doing his homework. But the memory of him barefoot and waving in his tie-dye shirt conjures up what I would print on a billboard: “Pawpaws — best when shared.”
Wild
For the past few years, I’ve listened to podcasts while walking Rose. I’d forgotten what it’s like to be outdoors without headphones, to walk without glancing down at a screen to check my step count or adjust the music volume or read a text.
Foraging for pawpaws this fall made me concentrate on the trees.
For what might be the first time, I walked with my senses wide open to the woods.
I distinguished the green of a fallen walnut from the green of a fallen pawpaw.
I took off my sunglasses to look up through the understory at the quivering dance of leaves and light and shadow.
I brushed sticky spiderwebs from my forehead and flared my nostrils, waiting for a waft of the tropics.
I tripped over roots less often than I used to.
I was more patient with Rose when she’d freeze on the trail, muzzle cocked to the side at the blast of a distant train or meow of mysterious cat. I felt a deep connection to the unplugged world.
Even on expeditions when I found no fruit, I would experience fulfillment: I would, as Kentuckian farmer and poet Wendell Berry wrote, “come into the peace of wild things … For a time, I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
X
… marks the spot: The first pawpaw tree I found was not in the wild.
It lived a few hundred yards from Virginia Tech’s campus. My brother had sent me a pin on Google maps for a pawpaw tree in Blacksburg. I hadn’t yet attended the dendrology lab, and failed to find the tree.
I returned later that afternoon. But this time I brought Steve (and Rose) with me. Steve found the tree in 90 seconds. Standing under its dark green leaves, I muttered and shook my head, “No pawpaws.”
I stepped closer to the tree trunk, letting the leaves dangle on my shoulders. I craned my neck and squinted.
“There’s one,” Steve said calmly.
“Where?” I asked.
“Right there,” Steve answered.
“Where? I don’t see it. You can see one? I’m not seeing it,” I said and walked deeper into the branches.
“It’s right there, in front of your face.”
“Where?”
Steve stepped forward and pointed his finger alongside my cheek. I followed the trajectory of his fingertip … right into a pawpaw fruit. It was practically touching my nose.
Then I saw another one hanging from a higher branch. And then another on the ground, mashed and bug-freckled beside a bright red plastic cup, probably toppled there from the jumble of other cups and beer cans covering a dilapidated wooden table nearby.
Two days later, on my way home from dendro, I visited the tree again. The mashed pawpaw on the ground had split all the way open, its mango-colored guts inching toward the red cup. Directly above it, another pawpaw, smooth as a jelly bean, dangled from a branch.
YouTube
Mission ImPAWssible began on Sunday, August 31. By Wednesday, September 17, I’d filled the fridge with over 100 pawpaw fruits — far too many for today, tomorrow or Sunday.
Fortunately, Rosholdt had told me about a pawpaw processing method that involves a salad spinner. I followed her instructions to watch the Appalachian Forager’s pawpaw processing tutorial on YouTube.
In less than an hour, I had a Ziplock bag of seed-free pawpaw pulp destined to become sorbet.
Later that night, I found a glob of pawpaw pulp in my hair.
Ziplock
The word pawpaw is fun to say.
Christensen believes that the vernacular quality of the name itself will maintain pawpaw’s connection to what’s rural and folksy.
“It’ll always have authenticity,” she predicts.
Rosholdt says that the future of pawpaws is frozen pawpaw pulp — a prepared product that’s relatively easy to ship and use.
D’Angelo believes that cultivating new pawpaw varieties will allow small, regional farmers to continue farming their land, rather than being taken over by corporations.
Lindsay Lindberg will be churning pawpaw fruits from the Lindberg’s own trees into Big Lick ice cream.
Onyx plans to have more pawpaw trees when he grows up, and also to expand his tree fort.
Seiler will be running through the Blue Ridge and Appalachian Mountains.
Some of the seeds I’ve saved will go to Danville — to the Gibson School greenhouse where fourth graders will learn about pawpaws this month. Perhaps at least a few will forage someday.
I certainly recommend it. There’s nothing like tasting the Virginia tropics.