Pawpaw Along the Red River

A Forgotten Fruit with Deep Roots

By Thomas Norman Aug 4, 2025

The Pawpaw. Photo credit: Thomas Norman

I found this pawpaw tree down along the Red River, where the water cuts soft into the earth and history seems to settle in the sediment. We were exploring near what once was Renfroe Station, a short-lived frontier outpost founded in 1780 eventually lost to backwater conflict. It’s the kind of place you can stand still and feel time stretch both ways—back through early settler hardship, and further still into Native American lifeways that shaped the land long before a log cabin ever rose here.

Under the canopy, where most folks wouldn’t think to look for fruit, I stumbled on a pawpaw tree heavy with ripe, orange-fleshed fruit. Sweet. Rich. Full. Tasting like juicy fruit gum met a mango, with just a whisper of banana. These trees weren’t just surviving—they were thriving in what seemed like a tropical jungle. One tree, which my wife and I nicknamed TNT, produced the best pawpaw we’d tasted all year—and we sampled 13 different cultivars and countless wild fruits.

For those unfamiliar, the pawpaw (Asimina triloba) is the largest edible fruit native to North America. It once stood a staple in the autumn foragers diet. Native tribes harvested it alongside hickory nuts and persimmons. Lewis and Clark relied on it during their expedition. Thomas Jefferson grew it at Monticello and even sent seeds to France. But over time, like so many wild foods, it faded from the table—not because it wasn’t good, but because it didn’t fit the industrial mold. It bruises easily, ripens sporadically, and doesn’t ship well. You won’t find it in the produce aisle.

Attempts to commercialize it started in earnest but slowly fizzled out. Farmers stuck to easier bets—apples, peaches, things you could box up and haul to market. Pawpaws remained in the woods, wild and waiting. And with them, much of the cultural memory around how to use them disappeared too.

But now? Now they’re being rediscovered. Chefs are slipping pawpaw into high-end desserts. Permaculturists are planting them in food forests. Folks like me are poking around in hollers and floodplains, tracking down old genetics and trying to understand what we’ve lost—and what we can bring back.

There’s something poetic about that, especially when the fruit comes from a place like this. The Red River doesn’t just hold water—it holds memory. And these trees? They might be silent witnesses to centuries of footsteps, canoe landings, battles, and harvests. They’ve persisted. Quietly. Just like the fruit they bear.

And pawpaws don’t just feed people.

The Zebra Swallowtail. Photo credit: Animalia

While we were walking the stand, my wife spotted a Zebra Swallowtail Caterpillar slowly working its way up one of the pawpaw plants. Turns out the pawpaw is the only host plant for Zebra Swallowtail. Without pawpaw, there’s no next generation of these striking, black-and-white butterflies.

The Zebra Swallowtail Caterpillar. Photo credit: Thomas Norman

Bringing pawpaw back isn’t just about novelty or nostalgia. It’s about resilience. It’s a fruit that doesn’t need pesticides, doesn’t demand perfect sun, and doesn’t belong to Big Ag. It’s perfectly suited to a future that values local food, ecological balance, and food sovereignty.

We’ll be offering seeds from this stand soon—especially from that TNT tree. If you plant them, know you’re not just growing a fruit. You’re planting history. You’re nurturing something native, something real, something that endured.

And that, to me, is what health and sustainability really mean—getting back to what our ancestors knew, and passing it forward, root by root.