Perhaps one of my favorite fruits is the papaya. One of the things I miss about New York is the ability to pick up a container of cut papaya at any bodega. It's not quite as thrilling as having access to all that fresh pineapple in Hawaii (as I recently blogged about), but it's good nonetheless.
The specimens above are growing in a food garden at the Honolulu Zoo. You can see that the stalk is self-cleaning, dropping its large, lobed leaves as the plant grows upward. The fruit are cauliflory, which means they grow directly attached the stem. Papayas when unripe, like the ones above, are often used in cooking, particularly in Thai cuisine (though the plant is native to Mexico). When ripe, the fruits turn yellow and have a deeply sweet (cloyingly so, to some) flavor.
Jen - one of my FAVORITE tropical plants. I had never seen it until visit to rural Honduras a few summers ago. I was able to tour some vernacular gardens and this was s tree growing in everyone's garden. I loved the way they were managed - if they grew too big, they would hack them back down so the fruit wasn't hanging too high overhead (ouch!).
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