Yesterday I took myself to the Botanical Gardens on the campus of Smith College. It was a beautiful day and loved walking among the different plants and flowers in the greenhouse and in the gardens. In the greenhouse they had a scavenger hunt of sorts designed for the younger visitors, but I enjoyed reading the facts too. One in particular got me thinking. "Oranges like bananas are also botanically considered berries."
Now, that suprised me. I knew that tomatoes are technically (botanically) a fruit, not a vegetable. I had heard that bananas were a berry, but oranges too?!?! I had to know more so I did a little research.
As it turns out, "botanically speaking, fruits are specifically structures that develop from flowers; “vegetable” is a very broad and nonspecific category, but generally includes any plant part humans eat which doesn’t develop from a flower." (https://www.lsop.colostate.edu/2020/04/29/everything-you-need-to-know-is-that-a-berry/) Also, botantists consider "oranges a hesperidium (member of the berry family) because it is the ovary of the orange blossom that creates the fleshy fruit carpels or sections." (https://delishably.com/fruits/Are-Oranges-Citrus-or-Berries) Finally, GET THIS, the fruit we know as raspberry is NOT a berry because it doesn't meet the botanist's definition.
I realized that we often take the explanation or classification that seems the most obvious, but the OrangeBerry and Raspfruit made me think that sometimes we need to dig a little deeper. Perhaps we assume a friend is acting rudely because they are angry with us or that a family member is feeling good about an upcoming milestone. Yet, if we are curious, if we dig a little deeper we can get to a better understanding of the full story.
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