Ancient fruit

DAY 154 (6 SEPTEMBER) – Peach tree (Prunus persica) (Vejer, Spain)

These fast ripening peaches hang from a tree belonging an Englishman whose home overlooks not only the wasteland that divides the old town here from the new, but also the Moroccan coast.

I learnt today that the word ‘peach’ comes from a widespread belief that the tree is native to ‘Persia’. But others say the domestication of the peach began as early as 6000 BC in the Zhejiang Province of China. And the oldest artistic representation of the fruit was by the Romans in the 1st century AD in Herculaneum.