I visited with a local urban garden guy today.  He bought a medium sized nursery from an elderly Italian man.  The man speaks little English.  There were several fig trees in the greenhouses that he brought from Italy.  They all look about like these.   Are you all salivating yet?  There will be cuttings in the fall and photos for ID in mid summer.  These cuttings wont be free as he has to make $$ off of these things.

 

 

Nice! I think the lower tree can spare some cuttings even now :)

I don't salivate until I see a photo of the ripe figs.  And the dude aint so pretty.  If he's Italian, where is his bike?

Suzi

Nice.  I like the greenhouse.

Wow that's pretty cool. Looks like those trees are quite old. Great find. I'd love to see pictures of the leaves and fruit when they're all leafed out and growing. How many trees are there in total?

Nice find. Keep us posted :)

Location, location, location.....nice to see older trees that haven't been cut down to the root-line each year from freezing weather.

Thanks for the pics, R. Cantor.


Frank

Wow those look old, pretty cool .....keep us posted

Nice find!

Very cool!  Yes, please keep us all posted when he makes his cuttings available!

nice find!

Well, bad news. I met the former owner of the greenhouse. He speaks English about as well as I do. All of the figs came from California nurseries. What a disappointment. We'll still try to ID them in mid summer. Some of the plants may have come from smaller nurseries and may yet be exotics the nurserymen brought from home. There's only 1 from Monrovia which sounds like it may be a Janice Seedless Kadota.

Not only that, but all of the large trunks are dead. Hopefully some of the smaller trunks will sprout soon. I will deliver some of my longer season figs to the greenhouse to start their season there.

Bummer...
There's still the hope that one of those will be a jewel. According to the literature, California had a huge amount of figs imported at the turn of the 20th Century, so there may be a sport or variety that was thought lost.
Also, those root suckers will take off, even if the large trunks are gone.
They have massive root systems to draw from.
Can't deny, that was a great find anyway.