The Italian Garden Project Foundation is pleased to announce that we are the recipients of a grant from the Francesco and Mary Giambelli Foundation for our Legacy Fig Tree Collection! The fig is a revered fruit to Italian Americans. It adapts and thrives in a land not its own, much like the immigrants themselves. Growing a fig tree when they arrived in the US was a way for our uprooted ancestors to have a small piece of the Old World in the New.

Many of their American born children and grandchildren now proudly associate the fig with their immigrant heritage. The fig tree has become a symbol of these hard-working immigrants who lived in close connection with the earth and brought with them a lifestyle of self-sufficiency and a reverence for growing and preparing food.