Accessory Fruits

Accessory fruits are not designer handbags or the latest fad. In the word of botany, accessory fruits are more familiar that you might expect.

Strawberries are accessory fruits (Alexas_Fotos) Pixabay

What is fruit?

Fruit is the tissue that surrounds the seeds of angiosperms (flowering plants). Fruit tissue is made from the ovary. Except when it isn’t. In some cases, a fruit develops from both the ovary and nearby tissue, found outside of the carpel. These neighborly tissues can be either the perianth, the flower whorls, or the hypanthium, the flower base. When this occurs, the part we eat is called an accessory fruit.

Parts of a flower (LadyofHats) Public Domain

Popular accessory fruits

Using our botanical definition of an accessory fruit, we learn that pineapples are accessory fruits because the fruit is made from the ovary plus tissue from the pistils and sepals. We also learn that strawberries are accessory fruits. [The seeds you see on a strawberry fruit are actually achenes, a type of dried fruit. Each achene develops from a single pistil.] Other popular accessory fruits include apples, figs, mulberries, and pears. And those delicious cashew nuts? Those are the seeds of the cashew apple, another accessory fruit.


Now you know.