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?

It is the same species; a single recessive gene switches off the fuzz.

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

All of them sit inside the rose family, Rosaceae.

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

It earned the name in the three decades after the Civil War, when its orchards boomed.

Which country grows roughly two-thirds of the world's peaches and nectarines?

No other country produces more than about five percent.

In China the peach is a traditional symbol of what?

The god Shou Xing 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?

Clingstones, which hold the pit tightly, are the ones that usually end up in cans.

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

'Stone fruit' is the everyday name for the same thing.

Peach trees are relatively short-lived. Roughly how long do most last?

UC Davis puts a commercial tree at about 15 years; in Maine it is closer to seven.

What did the ancient Romans call the peach?

'Persian apple' passed through Late Latin pessica and Old French pesche to become the English word.

The English name for the smooth-skinned peach was coined in 1611 as an adjective meaning what?

It first appeared in print in 1611.

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

In fact the fuzzless skin comes from a single recessive allele; the fuzzy peach skin is dominant.

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

The oldest peach stones come from the Kuahuqiao site near Hangzhou in the Yangtze delta.

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

They are so like modern pits that palaeontologists gave them a species name honouring the city.

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

The Herculaneum fragments now hang in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples.

Who first brought the peach to the Americas?

By 1580 it was growing in Latin America, and Native Americans in Virginia were raising it by 1629.

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

After the 1868 treaty they returned, replanted from saved pits and resprouted stumps, and had orchards again within two decades.

Most peach cultivars need 600 to 1,000 hours of winter chilling at roughly what temperature range?

Temperatures below −1 °C do not count, which is why the tropics can only grow peaches at altitude.

Peach blossom is damaged or killed once spring temperatures drop below roughly what?

The trees flower early, which is why a late frost can wipe out a whole season's crop.

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

Growers in wet-winter climates lean heavily on fungicides as a result.

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

Vitamin C is still higher in fruit ripened on the tree, and the ripening blocker 1-MCP ruins the aroma.

Raw peach flesh is roughly what percentage water?

A medium peach is about 46 calories, and more than half its sweetness comes from sucrose.

Which country has the greatest genetic diversity of peach cultivars, with 495 recognised varieties?

That is the usual signature of a crop's homeland.

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

Peacherines, sold in Australia and New Zealand, are claimed to be a peach-nectarine cross.

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

About 227 million nucleotides and roughly 28,000 protein-coding genes were mapped from the Lovell rootstock.

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

The first version came perched on an ice swan, a nod to Nellie Melba's role in Lohengrin.

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

Escoffier added the sweetened purée topping when he moved to the Ritz Carlton and warned that any variation 'ruins the delicate balance'.

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

Giuseppe Cipriani named it after the painter Giovanni Bellini, whose pinks reminded him of the drink.

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

Add a shot of vodka and it becomes a 'hairy navel'.

The first recorded cobbler recipe, in the 1839 Kentucky Housewife, was for a 'Peach Pot Pie or' what?

Grunts and slumps are New England cousins named for the noise they make while cooking.

Which annual college football postseason game has been played in Atlanta since 1968?

Chick-fil-A has sponsored it since 1997, and it is now part of the College Football Playoff rotation.

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?

He switched because a peach is 'prettier, bigger and squishier than a cherry'.

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

Selick had just made The Nightmare Before Christmas; the book was also turned into a musical in 2010.

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

She has since 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.

How many different women have sung as 'Peaches' in the duo Peaches & Herb?

Herb Fame has been the constant since 1966; Linda Greene sang on 'Reunited' and 'Shake Your Groove Thing'.

Momotarō, the Japanese folk hero born from a giant fruit, has a name that literally translates as what?

Tarō is simply a common boy's name, so the literal reading is 'Peach Tarō'.

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

The Korean painter An Kyŏn's Dream Journey to the Peach Blossom Land is his only surviving signed work.

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

The tower stood 138 feet tall; the event has been repeatedly cancelled since 2020.

Grower Samuel Rumph named the Elberta peach after whom?

He found the yellow-fleshed variety in 1870 in Marshallville, and it shipped far better than older types.

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

California and South Carolina both grew more.

According to Japanese tradition, the word momo-iro means the pink of which blossom?

Sakura-iro is the separate word for cherry-blossom pink.

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

The fruit stood for the heart and the leaf for the tongue.

A normal peach measures 5 to 7 cm across, but the largest can reach about what diameter?

At the other end, some are as small as 3 cm.

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

Genetics later showed the almond is a more distant cousin; the closest kin are China's wild peaches.

Peaches were grown in which English colony as early as 1629?

William Penn found wild peaches in Pennsylvania by 1683; the fruit had gone feral across the eastern seaboard.

Peaches and nectarines keep best at what storage temperature?

Even then they are usually eaten or canned within two weeks of harvest.

Peach cultivation reached Greece by roughly which date?

Alexander the Great is sometimes credited with bringing peaches from Persia, but no historical evidence supports it.

In a typical year, peach trees begin bearing fruit in which year after planting?

Most nursery trees are cultivars budded or grafted onto rootstocks such as Lovell or Nemaguard.