A tasty reminder of a faraway home

In the late 1950s, Miguel Angelo Zafarana sailed to New York from his home in Sicily. Within a few years, he'd settled in Astoria, Queens, among New York's large Italian-American community and had opened a pizzeria. At some point - his grandson Mario Zafarana doesn't know when - Miguel Angelo welcomed a visitor from his native village. In his luggage, the visitor carried a special present for his host: a cutting from a fig tree back home.

Today, Mr. Zafarana lives in Astoria himself, and last summer he planted a descendant of that tree in his garden. He hopes to have his first crop of figs next year. A cutting from his grandfather's tree had produced an offspring in the Bronx, where Zafarana grew up. He snipped his sapling from that second-generation tree, as did his Uncle Santino, who took his along when he moved to California in 1982.

Surely bringing a fig tree to California, home of the second-largest commercial fig crop in the world, is like bringing coals to Newcastle?

"That tree came from Sicily, from our village of [Polizzi] Generosa," Zafarana explains. "It's our heritage."

Stories like this one can be heard all over Astoria, a modest community of attached homes and low-rise, pre-World War II apartment buildings that have aspirational names such as the Princess Rita and the Astoria Chateau. Mario, who works as a gardener in Central Park, estimates that one-third of the homes have a fig tree, or more often two, in their yards.

There is no way to know for sure. While the city takes a census of public trees in parks and public rights of way every 10 years, there is no central databank for yard trees.

Moreover, fig trees don't belong in New York City. It's too cold.

The US Department of Agriculture has developed hardiness zones, which tell gardeners what will survive where. The higher the number, the warmer the climate is. Fig trees are supposed to grow in Zones 8 to 10. New York City is in Zone 7.

"I don't suppose they have olive trees there?" laughs Fiona Watt, chief of forestry and horticulture for the city's Parks and Recreation Department, when asked about the fig trees in Queens.

For the record, no.

Above and beyond botany, it seems extraordinary - enchanting - to find a piece of the Mediterranean flourishing in hyper-urban New York City, just across the East River from Manhattan.

But walk along the streets of working-class Astoria in late summer and look past the mom-and-pop butcher shops with skinned goats in the window, the dollar stores, the Greek nightclubs, and the hole-in-the-wall restaurants feeding harried cab drivers. Peer into postage-stamp-size backyards, between buildings, and down narrow alleyways.

There, you'll find hundreds of leafy, thriving fig trees heavy with the voluptuous, teardrop-shaped fruit. The trees were planted not just by Italians, who came to the neighborhood after World War I, but also by Greeks, who moved into the area in great numbers beginning in 1965.

"All Greeks, if they have their own homes, they have a garden. And all Greeks plant fig trees," says Christina, who answered the phone at Astoria's St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Cathedral. She declined to give her last name, but she was happy to talk about fig trees - her family has two.

"Figs are very popular in Greece. Greeks love figs," says Nicos Nicolaides, a social worker at the Hellenic American Neighborhood Action Committee. He can see two fig trees from his office window.

"The tree reminds them of their country," he says. "That shows something about the Greeks in Astoria. They like to keep their Greek heritage and their Greek customs, even the trees."

He might have been speaking of Evgenios Anninos, who came to America 45 years ago from the island of Kefalonia and now owns a real estate business. Ask him about his figs, and his eyes light up. Mr. Anninos walks through his office to a door at the back. In the small courtyard, surrounded on three sides by walls and buildings, are two lush fig trees. The pair dominate the tiny space, a sheltered spot that protects them from the elements.

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