Ficus racemosa. Common names: cluster fig, goolar (in Hindi) and atti (in Tamil). I painted this, with the plum-headed parakeet, in 2018, for this year’s book Hidden Kingdom — Fantastical ...

Inside the rounded fruit of a fig tree is a maze of flowers. That is, a fig is not actually a fruit; it is an inflorescence—a cluster of many flowers and seeds contained inside a bulbous stem. Because ...