PAPAYA FRUITS AND FLOWERS

The neighbor across the road makes a halfhearted attempt to keep a garden space halfway cleared, and you'd be surprised what crops of oranges, tangerines, bananas, and papayas he harvests. One of his 15-ft- tall papaya trees bearing two immature papayas appears below:

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Papaya trees, CARICA PAPAYA, are native to tropical America so maybe that explains why along roadsides and in abandoned cornfields you see wild papayas. The wild papayas' fruits aren't anywhere as large as those in the picture, though, and though birds such as orioles and woodpeckers love them, humans seldom bother to pick them. Those are wild papaya trees below:

On the left in that composite picture you see a typical female wild papaya tree loaded with immature, eyeball-size fruits, while on the right you see a male tree's very different, diffuse inflorescence of male flowers.

The flower situation in the Papaya Family, the Caricaceae, is much more complex than the plants merely coming in boy and girl trees. Sometimes male and female unisexual flowers appear on the same plant, plus four flower-types are recognized. I don't have it all figured out myself, but at least I can show you unisexual female and unisexual male flowers taken from two wild papaya trees along the road to Mexil, below:

In that composite picture the broken-open blossom on the left is the female. The oval, green item is the ovary, the ovary's white "neck" is the style, and the five fingerlike brown things are the stigmas. Stigmas, style and ovary together constitute the female pistil. Pollen grains will germinate on the stigmas and send rootlike pollen tubes down through the style to ovules inside the ovary, where the male and female sex germs will unite. The ovules will mature into seeds and the ovary into a papaya fruit. The flattish, yellow items are separate petals.

On the right the male flower contains nothing like a pistil, plus its petals are united at their bases to form a slender tube. At the tube's throat you can make out baglike, yellow anthers splitting open to release pollen. Usually anthers are borne on slender filaments but these anthers are practically stemless, or "sessile." An anther and filament together constitute a male stamen.