Free Printable Avocado Coloring Page with PDF Sheet

Avocado: History & Fun Facts

Ancient Cultivation in Mexico and Central America

Farmers in what is now central Mexico were growing avocado trees as far back as 5,000 BC, making it one of the oldest cultivated fruits in the Americas. Wild ancestors of the fruit were much smaller, closer to the size of a large olive, with a thin layer of flesh wrapped around a pit that took up most of the space. Generations of selective planting by Aztec, Maya, and other Mesoamerican growers slowly favored trees that produced bigger, creamier fruit, which is closer to the shape shown in the whole avocado in this picture.

The Aztec Name Behind the Word

The word avocado traces back to the Nahuatl term ahuacatl, a word the Aztecs also used for testicle because of the fruit's shape when it hangs in pairs from the branch. Spanish explorers who encountered the fruit in the 1500s struggled to pronounce the Nahuatl word and gradually shifted it toward aguacate, which English speakers later reshaped into avocado. Some old English recipe books even called it an alligator pear, a nickname inspired by the bumpy green skin of certain varieties.

One Giant Seed Inside

Botanically speaking, an avocado counts as a single-seeded berry, and that seed is the oversized round pit visible in the halved half of this coloring page. Few fruits devote so much of their interior to one seed instead of many small ones. Because the flesh clings loosely around that pit once the fruit ripens, cooks typically strike the pit with a knife blade and twist it free rather than trying to slice all the way through, which is why halved avocados are shown with the pit sitting in a smooth round hollow.

Why Avocados Soften After Picking

Unlike apples or peaches, avocados refuse to ripen while still hanging on the tree. Enzymes that soften the flesh only switch on after the fruit is picked, so growers snap them off firm and green and let them soften on kitchen counters days or weeks later. That quirk lets shippers move hard, unripe avocados across oceans without bruising, which is a major reason the fruit shows up in grocery stores far from the tropical regions where the trees actually grow.

Hass Avocados and Other Varieties

Most avocados sold in stores today trace back to a single tree planted in the 1920s by a California mail carrier named Rudolph Hass, who patented the pebbly-skinned variety that now bears his name. Other varieties, like the smooth, thin-skinned Fuerte, ripen with green skin that barely changes color, while Hass avocados darken from green to nearly black as they soften. A mature avocado tree can produce several hundred fruits in a single year once it reaches full size, and some trees keep bearing fruit for decades.

A Tropical Tree With Shallow Roots

Avocado trees need warm, frost-free weather and cannot survive hard freezes, which limits large-scale farming to places like Mexico, California, Peru, and parts of the Mediterranean. Despite growing quite tall, the tree's roots stay fairly shallow and spread wide instead of digging deep, so orchards are often planted on gentle slopes with careful irrigation to keep the roots from drying out. Mexico alone grows roughly a third of the world's avocado supply, with Michoacan state producing the bulk of the fruit that ends up in supermarkets across North America.