Avocado

An evergreen of the laurel family, the avocado is native to the Americas and grows nine to twenty metres tall with glossy, lance-shaped leaves and small pale green or yellowish flowers that have no petals. Botanically its fruit is a large berry around a single big seed; by cultivar the skin ripens green, brown, purplish or black over buttery, golden-green flesh. Archaeology shows people in Central and South America eating it thousands of years ago, and in Mesoamerica it was an important food crop, often handed over as tribute. The English name came by way of the Spanish aguacate from the Nahuatl āhuacatl. Kynes relates that the Aztecs, seeing the fruit hang in pairs, also used that word for 'testicle', though the fruit was its first sense and the other a euphemism. Eating avocados was thought to give a man strength and vigour and to heighten his virility, even the scent of the ripening fruit was counted erotic, and the English buccaneer William Dampier wrote that it roused lust. In magic the fruit is eaten to take on that lust and to draw a lover, a tree raised from the stone is kept indoors to bring love into the house, and the stone itself is carried for beauty.