Avocado
Persea americana.
Domestication: approximately 6000 BC, modern day Peru.
Native form: ciollo
Domesticated into three separate landraces.
Avocado is a fruit in the form of a berry with a single seed.
Earliest written account of an avocado is 1519.
Earliest account in English is 1669, when the term avocado was first coined.
Through the domestication process the avocado was bred to have a larger fruit size than it’s native ciollo.
As the man was descending an avocado tree she struck at him so vehemently that his right leg fell from his body, and he lay helpless. Gathering up the fruit, the woman hurried to the tapir's hiding-place, and the wicked couple went away together. Seriokai was found by a neighbor, who stanched his wound and took him home, where he was nursed back to health. So soon as he could, he mended his leg with a wooden stump; then, armed with bow and arrows, he started after the runaways. Although their path had long been obliterated, the Indian traced them through the wilderness by the avocado trees that had sprung from the seed scattered by the faithless wife. It was a long and weary following. He climbed mountains and forded rivers, but always there were avocado trees stretching away and away, and leading him nearer to his revenge. The trees grew smaller, showing that they were young. They shrank to saplings. They became mere sprouts. At last there were no trees, but only seeds, and then footprints. And so, at last, he overtook them. The outraged husband sent an arrow through the body of the tapir just as the beast bounded off from the edge of the world, and, seeing her companion so transfixed, the woman leaped also. Hot in his thirst for vengeance, Serio kai followed, and he still hunts the unrepentant ones through space. He is Orion, the woman is the Pleiades, and the tapir is the Hyades, with bloody eye.
Myths and Legends of Flowers, Trees, Fruits, and Plants, in All Ages and in All Climes – Charles Montgomery Skinner
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