Evan Sung for The New York Times  THIS morning, I grabbed a bowl from the cabinet, went outside and picked my breakfast of fresh figs.  No, I’m not vacationing near the Mediterranean coast. Nor am I in California or the South. I’m at home in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, where the fig tree in my tiny garden is covered in ripening fruit.  I’ve had the tree for 15 years, but when the figs arrive, it still seems like a miracle. As a lifelong New Yorker, harvesting fruit off my own tree wasn’t something I expected would become a late-summer rite.  But it has, and there is nothing that compares to that simple pleasure of pulling a piece of soft purple fruit off a tree branch in my own backyard, especially when the backyard is only a stone’s throw from the chaos of Flatbush Avenue. Although I can still hear delivery trucks idling, sirens shrieking and cars honking, the fig tree makes me feel at least momentarily connected to the earth.  Planting the tree was my Italian-American mother-in-law’s idea. When I moved into the brownstone in 1997, she regaled me with stories of fig trees all over Brooklyn. Potted fig trees thriving on patios in Park Slope. Fig trees tucked in postage-stamp yards in Dyker Heights. Fig trees spreading out regally in gardens in Bay Ridge. They were especially abundant in Carroll Gardens, where everyone with a spare foot of soil grew a lush tree that bore enough fruit to share with friends and relatives.  Fig trees are easy to grow, she assured me. So when I spotted a scrawny Ficus carica (Brown Turkey fig) for sale at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, I took it home and planted it in a halved bourbon barrel in the sunniest part of the yard, dreaming of a future of fig tarts.  My sapling turned out to be part of a long Brooklyn fig tree tradition.  While there are fig trees growing all over the five boroughs, they are predominantly in Brooklyn, said Annie Hauck-Lawson, an authority on New York City food culture and history, because Brooklyn had a large influx of Italians from the beginning of the 20th century until World War II. They arrived in America bearing cuttings.  Michele Scicolone, a writer specializing in Italian-American culinary traditions, explained: “There were certain plants that were iconic to Italian immigrants, and the fig was one of them. They could take a branch from a fig tree back home, let it go dormant during the long boat journey, then plant it when they got here, and it would grow.”  Her own grandparents in Bensonhurst had fig trees and a white peach tree that her grandmother claimed came from Procida, the island off Naples where the family was from.  In Carroll Gardens, Tony DiDio’s grandfather Biagio DiDio planted a fig tree in 1940 in homage to his Sicilian roots. The tree, now cared for by Mr. DiDio, is a treasured part of their family tradition.  “Every August,” Mr. DiDio said, “all anyone in my family talks about is the tree. ‘How are the figs doing?’ they all ask me. The tree is like a member of the family.”  Biagio was so invested in the figs that once they started to ripen, he would sit in the backyard with a can filled with stones. When birds came near the tree, he’d shake the can to scare them away.  He also wrapped the tree’s trunk and covered its roots each winter. “My grandfather used to say that the tree doesn’t know it’s in Brooklyn,” Mr. DiDio said. “It thinks it’s in Sicily, so he covered it in the winter so the snow wouldn’t give it away.” Wrapping fig trees remains a winter chore for many gardeners in the city. But it may not be necessary unless the plant is very exposed, according to Caleb Leech, the curator of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s herb garden.  For the very elements of the city that make it seem as if it would be inhospitable to fig trees, the brick and concrete that define New York, actually help the trees thrive in cold weather. All that brick and concrete contributes to raised ambient temperatures (the urban heat island effect), and the walls of brownstone gardens can protect plantings from the elements.  Mr. Leech added that fig trees are forgiving; if they die in winter, they can come back from the roots and bear fruit.
Fig trees are abundant in Brooklyn, producing soft, purple fruit that can be eaten by the handful, tossed into salads or threaded onto a skewer.