Elephant apple
Dillenia indica, Dilleniaceae
The elephant apple is native “from the Himalayas through the Indian subcontinent into Sri Lanka, and then east into southeast Asia and the Malay Archipelago”2, from Nepal to the Philippines3. The usual account of its name is that the large, hard fruit is accessible in the wild only to the biggest animals, and that elephants are fond of it4.
What is eaten is not the fruit proper but its sepals, “which become fleshy as the fruit develops”. People in its native range have used “the acidic sepals of the fruit, with their flavour of unripe apples”, raw and cooked for a very long time, and the tree was already in van Rheede’s Hortus Malabaricus of 1678, the great account of the plants of India’s west coast2. In Kolkata it is made into pickle4.
The name is shared, unhelpfully, with the wood apple, a different tree from a different family.
Sources
- GBIF Backbone Taxonomy: Dillenia indica, Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Supports: the accepted name and family.
- Dillenia indica, elephant apple, in Plants 400, Oxford University Herbaria. Supports: the range, the fleshy sepals and their flavour, the long use of the fruit, and the Hortus Malabaricus.
- Dillenia indica, Useful Tropical Plants Database. Supports: the countries where it grows.
- Dillenia indica, Wikipedia. Supports: the explanation of the name by way of elephants, citing a field study, and the Kolkata pickle.