Fruit, the fleshy or dry ripened ovary of a flowering plant, enclosing the seed or seeds.

Thus, apricots, bananas, and grapes, as well

as bean pods, corn grains, tomatoes, cucumbers, and (in their
shells) acorns and almonds, are all technically fruits. Popularly, however, the term is
restricted to the ripened ovaries that are sweet and either succulent or pulpy. For
treatment of the cultivation of fruits, see fruit farming. For treatment of the
nutrient composition and processing of fruits, see fruit processing.

Botanically, a fruit is a mature ovary and its associated parts. It usually contains seeds,
which have developed from the enclosed ovule after fertilization, although development
without fertilization, called parthenocarpy, is known, for example, in bananas.
Fertilization induces various changes in a flower: the anthers and stigma wither, the
petals drop off, and the sepals may be shed or undergo modifications; the ovary
enlarges, and the ovules develop into seeds, each containing an embryo plant. The
principal purpose of the fruit is the protection and dissemination of the seed. (See
also seed.)

Afghanistan: opium poppies

Collecting resin from opium poppy capsules in a field in Afghanistan, 2008.
Fruits are important sources of dietary fibre, vitamins (especially vitamin C),
and antioxidants. Although fresh fruits are subject to spoilage, their shelf life can be
extended by refrigeration or by the removal of oxygen from their storage or packaging
containers. Fruits can be processed into juices, jams, and jellies and preserved by
dehydration, canning, fermentation, and pickling. Waxes, such as those from bayberries
(wax myrtles), and vegetable ivory from the hard fruits of a South American palm
species (Phytelephas macrocarpa) are important fruit-derived products. Various drugs
come from fruits, such as morphine from the fruit of the opium poppy.
Types of fruits
legume fruit
An open legume fruit of the common pea (Pisum sativum), showing the immature seeds inside.(more)
The concept of “fruit” is based on such an odd mixture of practical and theoretical
considerations that it accommodates cases in which one flower gives rise to several
fruits (larkspur) as well as cases in which several flowers cooperate in producing one
fruit (mulberry). Pea and bean plants, exemplifying the simplest situation, show in each
flower a single pistil (female structure), traditionally thought of as a megasporophyll
or carpel. The carpel is believed to be the evolutionary product of an originally leaflike
organ bearing ovules along its margin. This organ was somehow folded along the
median line, with a meeting and coalescing of the margins of each half, the result being a
miniature closed but hollow pod with one row of ovules along the suture. In many
members of the rose and buttercup families, each flower contains a number of similar
single-carpelled pistils, separate and distinct, which together represent what is known as
an apocarpous gynoecium. In other cases, two to several carpels (still thought of as
megasporophylls, although perhaps not always justifiably) are assumed to have fused to
produce a single compound gynoecium (pistil), whose basal part, or ovary, may be
uniloculate (with one cavity) or pluriloculate (with several compartments), depending
on the method of carpel fusion.