QUEEN OF THE CANOE CROPS (NONI)
1000 years ago, Polynesians reached the islands of Hawaii. On their seaworthy canoes were only a handful of plant species, but among them was the divisively flavorful botanical wonderdrug known as noni (Morinda citrifolia). Known for its funky flavors and breadth of influence on traditional Hawaiian medicine, this pan-tropical tree knows how to grow just about anywhere a canoe can bring it. Learn all about noni and the much broader classification of 'fruit', this week on Completely Arbortrary.
Noni
(Morinda citrifolia)
Noni (Morinda citrifolia) is a tree that has gained a unique reputation over the ages. From one perspective, it’s an indispensable producer of food and medicine, a cultural necessity. From another perspective, it’s a vomitous aberration fit only for consumption when the other option is starving to death. I suppose it’s all in the eye of the beholder.
The Polynesians of the Southern Pacific Ocean are counted among those who hold noni in high regard. The ancient forebears of these island dwellers were accomplished seafarers who famously and astonishingly colonized remote islands by outrigger canoe, successfully finding and populating islands as far into the blue as Hawai’i, Rapa Nui, and New Zealand. With them on these voyages were twelve ‘canoe plants’ each considered to be essential to their lives. Most of these plants provided food, such as breadfruit, banana, and taro; noni, called the Queen of the Canoe Crops, was the only one specifically brought along for its medicinal uses.
The tradition of carrying noni to new places only increased as the world became one globalized marketplace. Being a generalist species, noni grows wherever it is planted, and often naturalizes itself into its new home with ease. Whether along the shoreline amongst lava rock or in fertile, well-drained soils, whether in the shade of a forest or under the unfiltered tropical sun, noni grows happily and starts producing fruit at the tender age of three or four.
Noni fruit has gained the unflattering reputation of tasting and smelling like vomit and was thus described as a so-called starvation fruit. It would appear however that this perspective is shared only by those whose ancestors did not know just how important it was. To the peoples of Southeast Asia down to Australia, the fruit of the noni tree is an important component of traditional foods, and historically every part of the plant was used for one reason or another.
Botanically speaking, noni fruit is called a multiple fruit. A multiple fruit is one that develops from the fusing together of several individual fruits from several individual flowers. Think about it as a conglomeration of single fruits into one super fruit. Noni produces 75-90 flowers in a single head, so if each of those flowers is fertilized, the resulting multiple fruit would be made up of 75-90 smaller fruits all fused into one mass.
Curiously, “botanically speaking” should herein be further specified to “botanically speaking in English”. A second kind of fruit that is very similar to the noni’s multiple is called an aggregate or compound fruit. This kind of fruit develops from a single flower with multiple ovaries, a classic example being a blackberry or raspberry. However, in non-English speaking areas, these definitions are swapped.
In 1832, an English botanist named John Lindley reversed these definitions by mistake in his Introduction to Botany and set the course for English speakers’ backwards assertions on which fruit type is which for the next 150 years. This of course caused significant confusion in the botanical world being that our agreed upon criteria for deciding which plant is related to which lays in clearly defining the kind of flower and fruit it each has. You can just imagine botanist around the world pulling out their hair while trying to sort out if some fruit is an English aggregate or metric multiple.
Noni, as a tree that grows in places usually not populated by a majority of English speakers, is perhaps more at home referring to its fruit as an aggregate. And those people that live there would likely do the same. Noni, it would seem, is a tree that defies a single definition or a single way of life and seems perfectly happy to remain exactly as it is in the eye of the beholder.
Completely Arbortrary is produced and hosted by Casey Clapp and Alex Crowson
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Cover art by Jillian Barthold
Music by Aves and The Mini-Vandals
Episode cover photo by Vengolis
Additional Reading:
The Indian mulberry or noni (Morinda citrifolia)
Information Sheet
Polynesian Triangle
Maui Plant of the Month
Confusion between multiple and aggregate fruits