50 Fun Facts About Peach

The peach was first domesticated in which country?

The Latin name persica is a leftover of the Roman belief that peaches came from Persia, a mistake botanists repeated for centuries.

A peach with a fuzz-free glossy skin is sold under what name?

Nectarine is the name for a fuzzless peach: it is the same species, not a hybrid, and a single recessive gene switches off the fuzz.

Peaches, cherries, plums and apricots all belong to which genus?

Prunus is the stone-fruit genus within the rose family, Rosaceae; its members share a single hard pit inside fleshy fruit.

Which US state earned the nickname 'the Peach State' in the decades after the Civil War?

Georgia earned the name in the three decades after the Civil War, when its growers shipped trainloads of peaches north and the orchards boomed.

The fuzz on a peach's skin is made of tiny hairs called what?

Trichomes are the fine hair-like outgrowths of the skin's epidermal cells that give a peach its fuzz; stomata are pores and lenticels are breathing spots in bark.

In China the peach is a traditional symbol of what?

Longevity is what the peach stands for: Shouxing, the god of long life, is usually shown holding one, and peach-wood charms were hung over doors to keep out evil.

Peaches whose flesh pulls cleanly away from the pit are called what?

Freestone peaches release the pit cleanly and are the ones sold for eating fresh; clingstones, which hold the pit tightly, usually end up in cans.

Because of its hard seed casing, the peach is botanically classified as what kind of fruit?

A drupe is a fruit with a fleshy outer layer around a hard, woody shell enclosing the seed; 'stone fruit' is the everyday name, and olives and mangoes are drupes too.

Roughly how long does a typical peach tree stay productive?

Under 20 years is typical: commercial orchards are commonly replanted within 10 to 15 years as yields fall, and few peach trees stay productive much beyond 20.

What did the ancient Romans call the peach?

Persicum malum, 'Persian apple', was the Roman name because the fruit reached them by way of Persia; it shortened to persica and came into English through Old French pesche.

Yellow peach flesh gets its colour from which group of pigments?

Carotenoids, the same pigment family that colours carrots, give yellow-fleshed peaches their colour; white-fleshed varieties lack them, and the red blush on the skin comes from anthocyanins.

Nectarines are often mistakenly believed to be a cross between a peach and which other fruit?

Plum is the usual guess, but the fuzzless fruit is simply a peach carrying a recessive allele that switches off the fuzz; no plum is involved.

The 2014 research pushing peach domestication back to about 6000 BCE came from which Chinese province?

Zhejiang's Kuahuqiao site, near Hangzhou in the Yangtze delta, yielded the oldest peach stones from a domestication sequence, which the 2014 study dated to about 8,000 years ago.

Fossil peach stones dating back 2.6 million years were found near which Chinese city?

Kunming, in Yunnan, is where the late Pliocene stones were found; they are so like modern pits that palaeontologists gave the species the name kunmingensis, after the city.

The oldest known artistic depictions of peaches are wall paintings preserved by which volcanic eruption?

Vesuvius buried Herculaneum in 79 CE and so preserved a fresco of peaches beside a glass jar of water, a painting later moved to the National Archaeological Museum in Naples.

Who first brought the peach to the Americas?

Spanish explorers carried the peach to the Americas in the 16th century; by 1580 it was growing in what is now Latin America, and native trade spread it north long before English settlement.

In 1864 Kit Carson's expedition destroyed thousands of peach trees in Canyon de Chelly to break which people?

The Navajo were starved into surrender and marched to Bosque Redondo on the Long Walk; after the 1868 treaty they returned to Canyon de Chelly and replanted its peach orchards.

Peach leaf curl is caused by a fungus of which genus?

Taphrina deformans is the fungus behind peach leaf curl, which puckers and reddens new leaves in spring; the other great peach disease, brown rot, is caused by a different genus.

Peach kernels contain amygdalin, which the body breaks down into which poison?

Cyanide is released when amygdalin, concentrated in the kernel inside the pit, is broken down by enzymes in the gut, which is why peach kernels should not be eaten in quantity.

Peach leaf curl, the fruit's most serious fungal disease, is promoted by which weather condition?

Cool winter rain washes the fungus's spores onto swelling buds, so the infection takes hold in wet late winters and early springs; growers in such climates rely on dormant-season fungicide sprays.

Peaches are 'climacteric' fruits, meaning they do what?

Keep ripening after picking is what climacteric means: the fruit produces a burst of ethylene that goes on softening it and developing its aroma off the tree, which is why peaches are shipped firm.

Raw peach flesh is roughly what percentage water?

88% water is close to the USDA figure for raw peach flesh, which is why a 100-gram serving carries only about 39 calories.

Samuel Rumph's Elberta peach was introduced in which decade?

1870s: Samuel Rumph of Marshallville selected the Elberta and released it in 1875; it shipped well by rail and became one of the most widely planted peaches in the country.

The flat, doughnut-shaped peach is known in Chinese as what?

Pan-tao, the 'flat peach', is the doughnut-shaped fruit that Chinese legend places in the garden of the Queen Mother of the West; Western growers sell it as the Saturn or doughnut peach.

The peach genome, published in 2013, has how many chromosome pairs?

Eight chromosome pairs make up the peach genome, sequenced from the doubled-haploid Lovell rootstock: about 227 million nucleotides carrying roughly 28,000 protein-coding genes.

Escoffier created Peach Melba in the 1890s to honour an opera singer from which country?

Australia was Nellie Melba's homeland; Escoffier's first version at the Savoy came perched on an ice swan, a nod to her role in Lohengrin.

Along with peaches and vanilla ice cream, what is the third essential ingredient of a Peach Melba?

Raspberry sauce, a sweetened raspberry purée, completes the dish: Escoffier added it when he reworked the recipe at the Carlton Hotel in London around 1900, after the Savoy original of the 1890s.

The Bellini cocktail of peach purée and Prosecco was invented at Harry's Bar in which city?

Venice's Harry's Bar is where Giuseppe Cipriani created it between 1934 and 1948, naming it after the painter Giovanni Bellini, whose pinks reminded him of the drink.

A fuzzy navel is a mix of peach schnapps and what?

Orange juice is the mixer, the 'navel' in the name coming from navel oranges and the 'fuzzy' from the peach; add a shot of vodka and it becomes a 'hairy navel'.

Grunts and slumps, the stovetop cousins of peach cobbler, come from which US region?

New England is home to grunts and slumps, peaches or berries stewed under dumpling dough on the stovetop and named, it is said, for the noise the fruit makes as it cooks.

The Peach Bowl, Atlanta's college football bowl game, was first played in which year?

1968 saw the first Peach Bowl, played at Grant Field, the Yellow Jackets' home stadium in Atlanta; the game later moved downtown and joined the College Football Playoff's bowl rotation in 2014.

Which 12-time batting champion, born in Narrows, was nicknamed 'the Peach' after his home state?

Ty Cobb, 'the Georgia Peach', got 98.2% of the vote on the first Hall of Fame ballot in 1936.

Roald Dahl first planned for the boy in his 1961 novel to travel inside a giant what?

Cherry was Dahl's first idea; he switched because a peach is 'prettier, bigger and squishier than a cherry', and the book appeared in 1961.

Who directed the 1996 stop-motion film of James and the Giant Peach?

Henry Selick directed it fresh from The Nightmare Before Christmas, with Tim Burton producing, which is why Burton is so often miscredited; the book also became a stage musical in 2010.

Nintendo's Peach was introduced in the 1985 Super Mario Bros. under what name?

Princess Toadstool was her name in Western releases until the mid-1990s, when English versions adopted the Japanese name Peach; she has appeared in more video games than any other female character.

Who voices Princess Peach in The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)?

She reprised the role in the 2026 sequel.

Which Peaches & Herb ballad topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 1979?

Reunited held the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for four weeks in 1979, sung by Herb Fame and Linda Greene, who had already scored with the disco hit Shake Your Groove Thing.

Momotarō, the Japanese folk hero born from a giant fruit, is known in English as what?

Peach Boy is the usual English title: momo is peach and Tarō a common boy's name, so the literal reading is 'Peach Tarō'; an old couple find him inside a giant peach floating down the river.

The Peach Blossom Spring, a fable about a hidden utopia, was written in 421 CE by which Chinese poet?

Tao Yuanming, the reclusive poet of the Eastern Jin, wrote the tale of a fisherman who follows a stream through peach blossom into a valley cut off from the world since the Qin dynasty.

The New Year's Eve Peach Drop lowered a giant peach down a 138-foot tower at which venue?

Underground Atlanta hosted the Peach Drop from 1989, with an 800-pound fibreglass peach descending the tower of lights at midnight; the event later moved to Woodruff Park.

Grower Samuel Rumph named the Elberta peach after whom?

His wife, Clara Elberta Rumph, gave the peach its name; the yellow-fleshed variety from Marshallville shipped far better than older types and spread across the South.

Despite the nickname, in 2014 the Peach State ranked where among US states for peach production?

California and South Carolina both grew more.

Momo no Sekku, Japan's Peach Festival on 3 March, is better known as what?

Hinamatsuri, the Doll Festival held on 3 March for girls, is also called Momo no Sekku, the Peach Festival, because peach trees blossom around that date in the old calendar.

Renaissance painters used a peach with a leaf attached to symbolise what?

Speaking truth from the heart is the reading: the fruit stood for the heart and the leaf for the tongue, so the two together meant a heart that speaks.

A peach flower, which opens before the leaves, usually has how many petals?

Five petals, pink and opening before the leaves, make up a peach flower, the typical count for the rose family; they appear singly or in pairs along the bare shoots in early spring.

Charles Darwin speculated the peach was a modified version of which nut-bearing relative?

Almond was Darwin's guess, and the two are indeed close relatives that can be crossed; genetics later showed the peach's nearest kin are the wild peaches of its Asian homeland.

Which English king is said to have died in 1216 after a 'surfeit of peaches'?

King John died at Newark in October 1216, and chroniclers blamed a surfeit of peaches and new cider; dysentery was the likelier cause.

Peaches and nectarines keep best at what storage temperature?

0 °C (32 °F) with high humidity keeps peaches best; storing them between about 2 and 10 °C (36 and 50 °F), the 'killing zone', brings on mealy, flavourless flesh known as chilling injury.

Peach cultivation reached Greece by roughly which date?

300 BCE is about when the peach reached Greece, having travelled west along trade routes; Alexander the Great is sometimes credited with bringing it back from his eastern conquests, but no historical evidence supports the story.

Commercial peach trees are usually propagated by which technique?

Budding onto a rootstock is the standard method: a bud of the chosen cultivar is inserted under the bark of a seedling rootstock such as Lovell or Nemaguard, so the tree fruits true to type.