Rose apple
Syzygium jambos, Myrtaceae, the myrtle family
The rose apple is a myrtle, not an apple, and Morton was blunt about it: “like many other fruits to which the word ‘apple’ has been attached, the rose apple in no way resembles an apple, neither in the tree nor in its fruit”2. It is native to the East Indies and Malaya, cultivated and naturalised across India and Sri Lanka, and in southern India it fruits in March and April2.
It is mostly eaten out of hand by children and seldom reaches a market. Stewed with sugar, or cooked with lemon juice, it makes a jam or jelly2.
The Malay word jambu, which names this whole group of fruits, is the Sanskrit jambū. Platts glosses it as “the rose-apple tree”, and from it comes Jambudvīpa, the old name for the Indian world in its own cosmology3; the Burmese dictionary has the same tree as “symbol of the Southern Island”4. Whether the rose apple of those old names is this species or its cousin the jamun, Syzygium cumini, which Platts identifies, is a question the atlas has not settled3.
Sources
- GBIF Backbone Taxonomy: Syzygium jambos, Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Supports: the accepted name and family.
- Rose Apple, in Fruits of Warm Climates, Julia F. Morton, 1987, Purdue University NewCROP. Supports: the range, the season in India, the remark on the name, and how the fruit is eaten.
- A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English, entries jambu and jambuk, J. T. Platts, 1884, Digital Dictionaries of South Asia. Supports: jambū as the rose-apple tree and the name Jambudvīpa.
- Myanmar-English Dictionary (Myanmar Language Commission, 1993), entry ဇမ္ဗုသပြေ, SEAlang Library. Supports: the Eugenia tree as the symbol of the Southern Island in Burmese cosmology.