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Papaya - Carica papaya
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about Carica papaya, the widely cultivated papaya (or papaw or pawpaw), a tropical fruit tree. For the mountain papaya (Vasconcellea pubescens) of South America, see Mountain papaya. For the Eastern North American tree (and fruit) called "pawpaw", see Asimina triloba.
Not to be confused with Chaenomeles speciosa (flowering quince) or Pseudocydonia chinensis (Chinese quince), which like Carica papaya are sometimes called mugua.
The papaya /pəˈpaɪə/ or /pəˈpɑːjə/ (from Carib via Spanish), papaw, or pawpaw is the fruit of the plant Carica papaya, the sole species in the genus Carica of the plant family Caricaceae. It is native to the tropics of the Americas, perhaps from southern Mexico and neighbouring Central America. It was first cultivated in Mexico several centuries before the emergence of the Mesoamerican classical civilizations.
The papaya is a large, tree-like plant, with a single stem growing from 5 to 10 m (16 to 33 ft) tall, with spirally arranged leaves confined to the top of the trunk. The lower trunk is conspicuously scarred where leaves and fruit were borne. The leaves are large, 50–70 cm (20–28 in) in diameter, deeply palmately lobed, with seven lobes. Unusually for such large plants, the trees are dioecious. The tree is usually unbranched, unless lopped. The flowers are similar in shape to the flowers of the Plumeria, but are much smaller and wax-like. They appear on the axils of the leaves, maturing into large fruit - 15–45 cm (5.9–18 in) long and 10–30 cm (3.9–12 in) in diameter. The fruit is ripe when it feels soft (as soft as a ripe avocado or a bit softer) and its skin has attained an amber to orange hue.
Carica papaya was the first transgenic fruit tree to have its genome deciphered.
Common names
Carica papaya plants and their fruits are known by different names around the English-speaking world:
North America and Belize: papaya
United Kingdom: The fruit is usually called papaya but is also known as papaw or pawpaw
Africa: pawpaw or papaw
Distribution
Carica papaya is native to the New World in Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, French Guiana, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Venezuela, and northern Argentina. C. papaya has become naturalized in the Bahamas, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, Puerto Rico, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the U.S. state of Florida, and Malawi and Tanzania in Africa. Additional crops of C. papaya are grown in Australia, the Philippines, and the U.S. state of Hawaii.
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