In Love The Fig, a 2016 article for The New Yorker, the writer Ben Crair references a 2001 research paper on the fruit that estimates fig consumption spans nearly thirteen hundred bird and mammal species. Unlike all of these birds and animals, I don’t think I’ve ever eaten a fig…. I certainly couldn’t spot one in an ‘ID The Fruit’ round of a pub quiz. Until I heard this new album from London-based DJ and producer Stella Zheng, I definitely hadn’t spent any time considering the fig or their importance to the wider natural world around them as detailed in Crair’s charming article.

Known primarily to this writer for her excellent DJ sets and online mixes, Stella’s production work here is quite illuminating, drawing inspiration from a fig tree that was central to family life growing up in a seaside Chinese town. The album comes via Tia Cousins and Wil R$N’s Music to Watch Seeds Grow By, who in the space of a few months worth of releases from Woo, Davis Galvin and others have developed into one of the most rewarding new labels presenting ambient, minimalist and new age soundscapes. All under the conceptual banner of music exploring flora.

This is a warm and welcoming album whose charms - gently billowing ambient melodics and delicate yet tricky percussive rhythms - really blossom when you have time to focus. In an era of Spotify-driven lean-back listening, sitting in the park on a sunny afternoon with Fig on repeat for company was where Zheng’s music really resonated. Just shy of 33 minutes from start to finish, many of the tracks here don’t last more than four minutes. This is unique for ambient-leaning music which can sometimes outstay its welcome when it comes to track duration, without really having much to say. Despite their brevity, Zheng fills her productions with a lot of textural detail and momentum that still retains an overall serene vibe.

As a DJ herself, you get the sense Zheng composed much of the album with some thought on how the music can be applied in the context of mixing one track with another. Tracks such as “Inward, Outward, Flourish,” ‘’Fruitless Oddities” and “Treefrog, Postman and Bell” start life from a rhythmic pulse that will appeal to deejays and selectors with an ear for ambient sounds. Elsewhere, both “Mission Purple” and “Last Flight of the Wasp” are playful with an undercurrent of oddness (tumbling drums and wavey bass line on the former, cheeky flute and the odd wolf howl on the latter) that brings to mind Lena Willikens excellent Phantom Delia EP for Cómeme.

The album ends on a high note with “Self-Portrait As A Fig,” where ambient rain sounds and gentle synth notes soon blossom into a delightful floating breakbeat gem glistening with hope. With some space in my garden set aside for the pack of fig seeds included in the cassette edition of the album, I’m ready to continue further on my own Ficus Carica journey!

Music to Watch Seeds Grow By 005: Stella Z (Fig) is out now on Music to Watch Seeds Grow By. Grip a copy on Bandcamp.