Prunus armeniaca Seeds | Chinese Apricot
LATIN NAME: Prunus armeniaca
COMMON NAME: Chinese Apricot
Plant Profile
Apricot drying is as old as the westward movement of the fruit, and the practice shaped whole regional economies: a crop that ripens quickly in a hot, dry summer can be turned into a storable product that travels farther than fresh fruit ever could.
The tree is small and deciduous, usually eight to twelve metres at most, with a rounded crown. Leaves are broad, rounded to heart-shaped at the base, drawn to a point, finely toothed and borne on long stalks with small glands near the blade. Flowers are white to pale pink with five rounded petals, and they are sessile, sitting directly on the wood of one-year-old spurs without any stalk, which is a quick way to tell an apricot from a plum at flowering time. They open before the leaves.
The fruit is a drupe with velvety skin, a pronounced suture line down one side and a single stone whose surface varies from nearly smooth to deeply pitted according to cultivar. The suture, the seam where the two halves of the carpel meet, is a useful field character, and the fuzz on the skin is denser than that of a peach but much finer. Ripening is compressed into a short early-summer window, so the crop is dried, preserved or eaten fresh rather than stored.
Orchard apricots are almost always grafted or budded, most commonly onto apricot seedling rootstock where the soil is light and well drained, and onto plum stock where the tree has to cope with heavier ground. Grafting onto a dwarfing plum root restricts the tree and brings it into bearing sooner, at the cost of some longevity. The operation is done in late summer by chip budding or in late winter by whip-and-tongue, with the union set low.
Science & Biotechnology
Apricot kernels fall into two chemical camps, and the difference is the whole reason the crop has two separate markets. Sweet-kernel cultivars are eaten as nuts, while bitter-kernel types carry enough amygdalin that they are handled as a raw material, and the two are hard to tell apart until the stone is opened. Traditional growers in northern China selected deliberately for one or the other, keeping the bitter line purely for its kernels.
Uses & Benefits
The binomial records an old misunderstanding: the tree was named for Armenia because that is where European botanists first met it in quantity, but its centre of diversity lies in China and the mountains of Central Asia, where wild apricot populations still grow. Cultivated fruit moved west along the caravan routes and east into Korea and Japan, and in every region it arrived it was renamed, grafted and selected until local orchard types took on distinct shapes and flavours.
Growing from Seed
Bitter kernels contain amygdalin, a cyanogenic diglucoside stored in cell compartments separate from the enzyme that acts on it, emulsin, a beta-glucosidase. Crush the kernel in the presence of water and the two meet: amygdalin is hydrolysed stepwise to prunasin, then to mandelonitrile, which breaks down into benzaldehyde and hydrocyanic acid. The characteristic marzipan odour is benzaldehyde, and the toxicity of bitter kernels comes from the same reaction. This is why the kernels are soaked, boiled or dried before any culinary use, and why a bitter-kernel crop is never treated casually.
Kernel type is inherited, and nurseries select for it deliberately; a seedling raised from a bitter stone will usually give bitter kernels, so anyone planning a kernel crop should buy named stock rather than sow from a stray stone. Kernel oil pressed from the bitter type is used in cosmetics and personal care, where the benzaldehyde aroma is valued rather than feared.
Apricot stones, like most Prunus seed, are dormant and need a cold, moist period before they will rise. Sow them in autumn in a frame, into a mix of two parts sieved compost, one part coarse sand and one part leaf mould, pressing each stone in about twice its own depth. Keep the frame shaded and damp through the winter and leave it in place until the shoots appear the following spring. Break off the woody shell only if you are certain you can do it without nicking the kernel, since cracked seed rots. Set young trees into their final positions in autumn, spacing them four to five metres apart if you want fruit, and give each one a stake for its first seasons.
Apricot flowers early, so the best site is a warm wall where the blossoms escape the worst of late frost. Give the tree a deep, free-draining soil with lime in it, prune lightly in the growing season rather than in winter, and thin the young fruit if the set is heavy.
Our Take
Grow it for the flowers and the kernel as much as for the fruit, and never sow a stone you cannot identify, since bitterness is inherited and invisible on the tree. The genus offers several hardy alternatives for cold gardens, among them Manchurian apricot and the even tougher Siberian apricot, while the Japanese apricot is grown for blossoms on bare winter wood.
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