Cacao

Once the dominant canopy hardwood of the eastern United States forest - an estimated four billion trees, prized for fast growth, rot-resistant timber, and an enormous annual crop of sweet edible nuts that fed people, livestock, and wildlife alike. In the early 1900s an introduced Asian fungus, chestnut blight (Cryphonectria parasitica), swept through and functionally destroyed it: by the 1950s the species was effectively extinct as a mature forest tree. Surviving root systems still send up sprouts from old stumps, but the blight almost always girdles and kills them before they can grow large enough to flower and reproduce. The honest reality for a gardener is that you cannot reliably grow a mature wild-type American chestnut today. The realistic paths are blight-resistant backcross hybrids from The American Chestnut Foundation or transgenic blight-tolerant lines still being deployed - not a pure wild seedling, which the blight will almost certainly kill.

A tough, medium-sized native tree of the eastern and midwestern United States, grown as much for its showy edible orange fruit as for its distinctive thick, dark gray bark broken into rectangular blocks. Small urn-shaped white-to-greenish-yellow flowers open in May and June, and the sweet fruit ripens after frost. Largely dioecious - a female tree needs a male pollinizer nearby to set fruit - and notably drought- and walnut-tolerant once established.

A frost-tender broadleaf evergreen tree of the laurel family, native to Mexico and Central America and grown across the tropics and subtropics for its buttery, pear-shaped fruit. Glossy dark-green elliptic leaves 4 to 8 inches long clothe a tree that reaches 30 to 60 feet, hung with greenish-yellow flower panicles that give way to large single-seeded berries. Hardy only in USDA zones 10-12 - north of that it is an indoor curiosity easily sprouted from a pit, but one that rarely fruits.

A handsome, intensely aromatic broadleaf evergreen tree native to coastal California and southwestern Oregon, where it grows from a dense, rounded shade tree of 30 to 75 feet down to a multi-stemmed large shrub on harsher sites. The narrow, glossy, dark-green leaves are richly scented - crush one and the pungent, spicy oil is unmistakable - and small clusters of pale yellow-green flowers in late winter and early spring give way to round, olive-like fruit that ripens from green to purple. It is one of the most fragrant trees of the West Coast and a tough, drought-adapted evergreen for zones 7-9, but it carries two important cautions: the oils are strong enough to earn it the nickname 'headache tree,' and it is a major foliar host and reservoir for Phytophthora ramorum, the pathogen behind Sudden Oak Death, so it should not be planted near oaks or tanoaks in affected regions.

An ancient Mediterranean fruit tree grown for millennia for its sweet, soft edible figs - a deciduous shrub (10 to 15 feet) or small tree (to 15 to 30 feet) with bold, deeply 3-5 lobed palmate leaves and smooth silver-gray bark that gnarls handsomely with age. Its tiny greenish flowers bloom hidden inside hollow receptacles that swell into the fruit; most cultivars are parthenocarpic, setting figs without pollination. Best in USDA Zones 8-10, it survives Zones 6-7 in sheltered, south-facing spots with winter protection or grown in containers moved indoors.

Jelly palm, also sold as pindo palm, is the cold-hardy feather palm of southern Brazil (Rio Grande do Sul) and Uruguay, and one of the hardiest feather-leaved palms in cultivation. For decades it was treated as Butia capitata, and nurseries and several references still sell and describe this palm as Butia capitata, although Kew's WCVP accepts Butia odorata and the true B. capitata is a more tropical, less hardy palm that is rare in gardens. It is a slow-growing, single-stemmed palm of 15 to 20 feet with a stout trunk knobbed by persistent leaf bases and a crown of long, arching, strongly recurved blue-green to gray-green leaves whose stalks are edged with sharp teeth. Large sprays of small, fruity-scented cream to yellowish flowers are followed by clusters of edible yellow to orange fruit about 1 inch across, sweet and fibrous around a hard stone and traditionally made into jelly or wine. UF/IFAS rates it hardy to about 10°F, and notes that it survives in south Florida but grows much better in cooler, less humid climates. It is not documented as invasive, though Wikipedia records occasional naturalized populations in the southeastern United States.

A frost-free edible palette for humid subtropical and tropical gardens: fruiting canopy, understory crops, edible roots, and container-friendly patio plants.