Luke (Lukeott) and Ricci (JazzBass) met at my place. I showed Luke around (Ricci had been to my place before)my yard to see my trees and he sampled a few of my figs. We then drove to Bisirri's to meet with Mr Bisirri. He was out in his garden area propagating "non fig" plants. We had quite a conversation about fig growing, propagation, feeding and the like. He insists he has only 2 types, purple and white. Ricci and I are certain we got 2 different dark figs. One has a more ornate leaf and produces small somewhat tear drop shaped dark figs. The other produces larger (medium) sized dark figs and is what I have been calling Bisirri Lightnot as it was sold to me as a light fig. This type is also what Ricci has been calling Bisirri #1. This is the true Bisirri Dark. Here's where the confusion comes in. At Bisirri's, the larger fig, the true BD has a leaf that looks more like the smaller fig we have in our collections. So are they really 2 different figs??? Do they morph size shape and color? If they can do that they are probably the same fig, hey Herman what do you think? I think they really are different figs, the fruit looks distinctively different. At previous meetings with Mr Bisirri's son on different occasions, both Ricci and I were told that they get trees from friends and I'm thinking how easy they could wind up in stock along with the Bisirri trees.
And now for the elusive Bisirri's White. Yes it does exsist, even if Ricci, Luke and I have each purchased multiple plants and only wound up with dark figs. Mr Bisirri explains that he has had problems with customers removing labels, I guess he has a lot of kids coming to his place. I noticed too that he has 4 stock trees of the dark and only one stock tree of the white so that makes the odds more in favor of winding up with a dark when you want a white. OK so still just ID by leaf right? Wrong. The white juvenile leaves are 3 lobed and look like the juvenile true dark. OK I hope that explains it.
What did we get? Luke purchased 2 trees marked White with some figs on them so he will know if they are white or dark very soon. Ricci and I didn't want to take the chance of another confusion so I asked Mr Bisirri if he would sell us some green cuttings directly off of his white tree which we could plainly see had white figs on it. He graciously offered them to us for free, "cut as much as you want" he said. So we looked for branches which had only tiny figs and cut those off.
The first 2 pics are the stock dark trees, then a pic of the sales trees. The rest are the white trees including the pics of just the leaves. The broken open fruit White) was probably a couple days away from being ripe but Mr Bisirri insisted we take it. We ate a few figs from his trees but he picks them every morning at 6am so we only found a few that he overlooked. Quite a character, a real old time fig man, 89 years young.