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Excerpts from Jim Conrad's
Naturalist Newsletter
from the May 8, 2019 Newsletter entry issued from Tepakán, Yucatán, MÉXICO
CASHEW TREE FLOWERING WITH YOUNG FRUITS
Last March 31, during my camping trip into northern Guatemala's Petén department, while exploring little gravel roads on the south side of Sayaxché, several Cashew trees turned up planted near people's houses, next to the road. I knew they were Cashews, ANACARDIUM OCCIDENTALE of the Cashew/Poison Ivy Family, the Anacardiaceae, because Cashew fruits are among the weirdest-looking of all fruits. Once you learn them, you don't forget them, even if they're just starting to form among the flowers, as shown at the top of this page.
You can see that the leathery, evergreen leaves are interestingly rounded at their tips, and that the leaves' veins form a "herringbone pattern." The many, small flowers are fairly normal looking for the Cashew Family, being disposed in panicle-type inflorescences at the tips of branches. But look at those fruits, of which two appear in the above picture. Dangling among the flowers, they look like fat, green, C-shaped worms wearing purplish dunce caps.
When the flowers are blossoming, they show no indications that they're going to produce such a weird looking fruit, as you can see below:
The flower has five recurved, purple-striped petals and as many green calyx sepals. The cream-colored, curved item is the ovary's stigma-tipped style. Only if you find a flower that's already been pollinated, the petals and stamens have fallen off, and the ovary has begun enlarging to form a fruit can you start seeing the beginnings of a cashew fruit, as shown at the left side of the image ;shown below:
At the bottom, left in that image, that's the swelling ovary, the future fruit. Attached to that, the purplish, cone-shaped item at the picture's top, left, is the former blossom's pedicel, enlarging to form what will become known as the fruit's receptacle, more technically known as the hypocarpium. Fruits associated with such conspicuous attachments are known as "accessory fruits."
At maturity, the actual fruit will be a brownish little thing stuck to the bottom of a much larger, reddish and fleshy receptacle. The single seed inside the little fruit, the kernel, will provide the cashew "nut" we like to eat after the kernel is roasted. People just interested in the cashe nut may discard the fleshy receptacle. However, in our area, people are more likely to throw away the kernel-bearing fruit, considering cleaning and roasting each one too much trouble for a single "nut," but they like to eat the fleshy receptacles, which has nothing like a nut inside it. Sometimes the fleshy receptacle is called the cashew-apple. You might guess that the Maya like to eat them with hot chili powder, a little salt and a spritz of lime juice. In Spanish the Cashew is known as Marañón.
The Cashew tree itself is native to northeastern Brazil, but has been introduced into tropical countries worldwide. The trees I saw outside Sayaxché grew no higher than about 3.5m (12ft), but I read that they can reach 14m (46ft) tall.