Fruits have a huge impact on the way people view plants. They represent a very important percentage of the vegetable products that we consume and, in fact, for this reason, new varieties and hybrids of the most popular species for human consumption continue to be sought every day.
However, do you really know what the fruits are and how they are classified or how many classifications of these are there really? If you want to learn more about types of fruits and their characteristics, keep reading us in this Green Ecologist article.
If we speak in botanical terms, the fruit is the organ that is formed from the flower, either complete or from some of its parts, and that is responsible for protect the seed or seeds while they mature.
¿How the fruit is formed? Usually the fruit is formed when the ovum is fertilized. From there the ovary hardens and the fruit begins to form. The ovary walls give rise to the pericarp, which in turn is made up of the outermost part of the fruit, which is the epicarp, the middle layer, which is the mesocarp, and the endocarp, which is the inner layer that protects the seed.
There are several ways to classify the fruits according to the criterion that we take as a reference, as we will see in the following sections.
In this classification we will look at the characteristics of the pericarp of the fruit. There are two main groups: nuts and fleshy fruits.
This classification is very simple and only looks at whether the fruit contains a single seed or whether it contains several seeds.
Dehiscent fruits are those that are capable of opening spontaneously to release their seeds. Thus, this classification divide the fruits into dehiscent and indehiscent. In turn, there are many types of dehiscent fruits, among which we can differentiate the following:
We find in this type of classification simple and complex fruits:
In this classification system, we will look at whether the fruit comes from a single carpel, in which case it is a monocarpic fruit, or if it is made of several carpels, being a polycarpic fruit. In turn, polycarpic fruits can be apocarpic or syncarpic depending on whether the carpels that have given rise to them were free or welded and, finally, the syncarpics can be opened or closed depending on whether or not they have internal partitions.
As a final detail, it should be noted that all these classification systems are independent and not exclusive, that is, a fruit can be described with several of them at the same time. Now that you have known the different classifications of types of fruits, we recommend you learn more about them with these curious posts about the Difference between fruit and vegetables and 30 names of rare tropical fruits.
Also, if you want to know more about other parts of plants and trees, we recommend reading about the Types of leaves and the Types of flowers.
If you want to read more articles similar to Types of fruits, we recommend that you enter our category of Cultivation and care of plants.