Quince

Appearance

The tree grows 5 to 8 metres high and 4 to 6 metres wide. The fruit is 7 to 12 centimetres long and 6 to 9 centimetres across.

The immature fruit is green with dense grey-white pubescence, most of which rubs off before maturity in late autumn when the fruit changes colour to yellow with hard, strongly perfumed flesh. The leaves are alternately arranged, simple, 6–11 cm long, with an entire margin and densely pubescent with fine white hairs. The flowers, produced in spring after the leaves, are white or pink, 5 cm across, with five petals.

Distribution

It is native to rocky slopes and woodland margins in South-west Asia, Turkey and Iran although it can be grown successfully at latitudes as far north as Scotland. It should not be confused with its relative, the Flowering Quince.

Predators

Quince is used as a food plant by the larvae of some Lepidoptera species including brown-tail, "Bucculatrix bechsteinella", "Bucculatrix pomifoliella", "Coleophora cerasivorella", "Coleophora malivorella", green pug and winter moth.

Cultural

* In Turkey, the expression "ayvayı yemek" is used as a derogatory term indicating any unpleasant situation or a malevolent incident to avoid. This usage is likened to the rather bitter aftertaste of a quince fruit inside the mouth.
⤷  When a baby is born in Slavonia, a quince tree is planted as a symbol of fertility, love and life.
⤷  Ancient Greek poets used quinces as a mildly ribald term for teenage breasts.
⤷  Although the book of Genesis does not name the specific type of the fruit that Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden of Eden, some ancient texts suggest Eve's fruit of temptation might have been a quince.
⤷  In Plutarch's "Lives", Solon is said to have decreed that "bride and bridegroom shall be shut into a chamber, and eat a quince together."