Pawpaws

The pawpaw is native to the eastern United States, the largest edible fruit native to North America. Unlike most fruits covered here, it was never brought from elsewhere — its documented history is entirely about American selection and breeding rather than international spread.

Uncle Tom holds a genuinely singular distinction: documented in an 1905 book on pawpaw cultivation, it's the first pawpaw variety ever formally named — predating essentially every other named cultivar grown today. George A. Zimmerman undertook an 18-year pawpaw breeding project near Piketown, Pennsylvania, beginning in 1923, eventually growing an orchard of more than 60 named and unnamed varieties, likely encompassing nearly all pawpaw varieties known at the time.

Breeder Neal Peterson's own published research found something sobering: of more than 50 pawpaw cultivars named between 1900 and 1950, only two — Sweet Alice and Middletown — survive in cultivation today. Most of an entire generation of American pawpaw breeding simply vanished.

Kentucky State University runs the only full-time university pawpaw research program in the world, established in 1990, and has released three trademarked cultivars: KSU-Atwood, KSU-Benson, and KSU-Chappell.

Neal Peterson began his own pawpaw breeding project in 1980 while working as a USDA economist, not a horticulturist. He planted 800 seedlings at the University of Maryland in 1982, and by 1996 had narrowed 1,500 trees down to the 18 best-tasting; seven of his selections — Shenandoah, Susquehanna, Rappahannock, Allegheny, Potomac, Wabash, and Tallahatchie — are now trademarked and sold as "Peterson Pawpaws," widely considered the modern gold standard for the fruit.

Pawpaw flowers are pollinated by flies and beetles rather than bees, drawn in by the flowers' notably unpleasant, faintly rotten smell — a real, practical reason some growers hang roadkill or rotting meat near their trees during bloom to attract more pollinators.