My Story

My name is Caju (The fruit- Portuguese name) my origin and native at north eastern Brazil. I am the Cajueiro (the tree) born from the seed. I am called Cashew and my botanic name is Anacardium occidentale and I am a flowering plant that belongs to a flowering plant family Anacardiaceae as a tree. Now I am widely grown all over in tropical climates for its cashew “nuts” and cashew apples.

I am a small evergreen tree and my growth is up to 10-12 meters with a short, often irregularly-shaped trunk. My leaves are spirally arranged, leathery textured, elliptic to ovate, 4-22 cm long, and 2-15 cm broad, with a smooth margin. My flowers are produced in a panicle or corymb up to 26 cm long, each flower small, pale green at first then turning reddish, with five slender, acute petals 7-15 mm long. I appear on the tree to be the fruit of the cashew tree is an oval to pear-shaped accessory fruit or false fruit that develops from the receptacle of the cashew flower. My cashew apple, called or better known in Central America as “marañón”, ripens into a yellow and/or red structure about 5–11 cm long. My true fruit of the cashew tree is a kidney or boxing-glove-shaped drupe that grows at the end of the pseudofruit. My drupe develops first on the tree, and then the peduncle expands into the pseudofruit.

I am a single seed with cashew nut. Me as a nut in the culinary sense and in the botanical sense I am the fruit of the cashew is a seed. However, I was classified as a nut by some botanists. My seed is surrounded by a double shell containing a caustic phenolic resin, urushiol, a potent skin irritant toxin (also found in the related poison ivy). Some people are allergic to me, but I am less frequent allergens than some other nuts.