Identify a fruit tree from a photo

Fruit trees are easier to identify than most garden plants for one reason: a short list of families covers almost all of them. Apples, pears, plums, cherries, peaches and apricots are all in the rose family. Oranges, lemons, limes and pomelos are citrus. Figs and mulberries share a family with jackfruit. Once the identifier, or your own eye, puts a tree in the right family, a few field marks usually settle the species.

Start with the leaf

Most of the year a fruit tree has leaves and nothing else, so the leaf does most of the work. Check these in order; the first two split fruit trees into groups faster than shape does.

• Arrangement: alternate (one leaf per node, zig-zagging up the twig) or opposite (in pairs). Most fruit trees are alternate. Olive, guava, pomegranate and mangosteen are opposite, which narrows things quickly.
• Simple or compound: one blade per stalk, or several leaflets on one stalk. Walnut, pecan, lychee, longan and tamarind are compound; apple, citrus and mango are simple.
• Edge: finely toothed (most of the rose family), smooth (mango, avocado), smooth to finely toothed (citrus), or lobed (fig, mulberry, breadfruit).
• Smell: crush a leaf. Citrus smells of citrus, guava is spicy, mango is resinous, and many avocados smell faintly of aniseed.
• Sap: a white, milky sap from a torn leaf or twig points to the fig and mulberry family (and jackfruit), or to the sapote family in the tropics.

For the photo, pick one whole, mature leaf from the middle of a branch, not a new shoot. Shoot it flat and from above. For a compound leaf, get the whole leaf with all its leaflets in the frame. The full method is on the plant identifier page, and the tree identification by leaf guide explains each leaf feature in more detail.

Field marks for common fruit trees

Apple and pear

Both have simple, alternate, finely toothed leaves and white to pinkish flowers in clusters. Apple leaves are usually soft and slightly downy underneath, and apple flowers are often flushed pink. Pear leaves are glossier and smoother, the flowers are pure white, and pear trees tend to grow more upright.

Cherry, plum, peach and apricot

These stone fruits are all Prunus. Cherry bark is shiny and marked with horizontal bands of pores (lenticels). Peach leaves are long, narrow and often fold along the midrib. Many Prunus have one or two tiny glands on the leaf stalk just below the blade, which is a useful check with a magnifier.

Citrus

Glossy, aromatic leaves with smooth to finely toothed edges (lemon is often toothed). Oil glands show as translucent dots against the light, and there are often thorns where the leaf meets the twig. The leaf stalk is often winged. It is easy to recognise a citrus; naming the exact type is harder, because many are hybrids. Our guides cover pomelo and kaffir lime, whose winged leaf stalk is almost as large as the leaf itself.

Fig and mulberry

Fig leaves are large, rough and usually deeply lobed into three to five fingers. Mulberry leaves are toothed and can be unlobed, mitten-shaped or several-lobed on the same tree. Both bleed white sap.

Olive and pomegranate

Olive has narrow, opposite leaves that are grey-green above and silvery beneath, on a tree with gnarled bark as it ages. Pomegranate is a shrubby tree with small, narrow, glossy leaves, and its flowers are bright orange-red with a thick, leathery base.

Mango and avocado

Both have large, simple, smooth-edged leaves. Mango leaves are long, narrow and leathery, crowded near the branch tips, and smell resinous when crushed. Avocado leaves are broader and softer. The tropical fruit tree identifier covers these and other warm-climate trees in depth.

Using bark, flowers and fruit

Bark changes with age and is the weakest single feature, but a few are distinctive: banded cherry bark, the smooth, flaking, mottled bark of guava, and the soft, scarred trunk of a papaya. Flowers are the most distinctive part of nearly every tree, and the season is short, so photograph them when you see them. Fruit tells you the most of all; note how it is carried, because some trees fruit straight off the trunk, like jackfruit.

Common mix-ups

• Ornamental cherries, crabapples and flowering pears look like their fruiting relatives. The identifier may suggest the genus; verify the result. Whether a tree is a fruiting variety depends on what it produces.
• Seedlings from a fruit pit or seed are the same species as the parent but rarely the same variety.
• Suckers growing from the base of a grafted tree come from the rootstock, which may be a different species or variety from the top of the tree.
• Young trees in a nursery bed can have larger or differently shaped leaves than mature trees of the same species.