Significance

• While fig trees technically do flower, you'll never see anything that resembles a flower. Fig flowers are syconiums, or inside-out flowers. All you see is the outside of the fig developing. The flower parts are inside.
  
  

Taste

• When you eat figs, you're crunching down on all the "seeds" inside the fig syconium. These seeds are fig flower ovaries that were unfertilized, and did not develop. These ovaries give the fig a "resin-like" flavor, according to Texas A & M horticulturists Calvin G. Lyons and George Ray McEachern.
  
  

Pollination

• Many figs develop without pollination, since the tissue that needs pollination is inside the fruit. Some fig trees that require pollination rely on a fig wasp to get inside the fig and pollinate the fruit. If too many fig wasps try to pollinate the fruit, the figs can split. Figs that rely on fig wasps for pollination do not develop and will drop off the tree if they don't pollinate.
  
  

Problems

• Rapidly growing fig trees tend to drop fruit on the ground before it is mature. Stress can also cause the fig tree to lose fruit via dropping. Too little or too much water, cold weather, changes in weather or nematodes in the soil cause stress. Trees that set fruit without pollination, such as the fig and persimmon respond to stress by "aborting" fruit, or dropping it; there is nothing you can do to prevent this aside from providing good care, according to Texas A&M University's Aggrilife Extension.