From the
Tropical Fruit News, Rare Fruit Council
International Miami RFCI
by Steve Howe
The Big Pine Caimito
Bob and Donna Cannon, and Readers,
I wish to compliment the excellent articles on caimito and satinleaf by Little, Wadsworth and Marrero (TFN Nov. 93); of all the Chrysophyllum
species these two are my favorites. After typing forests in the Great
Antillean Bio Realm--which to the north includes South Florida below
the lake--I have made a small collection of them at my 5 acre station
and Adolf Grimal's field trials. (TFN. Aug. & Sept. 93) Several of
our friends own related seedling varieties from these trees.
My
Great Antillean study area is Puerto Rico to Cozumel east to west and
from here (Big Pine, just north of Key West) to Jamaica. In that
country, caimito juice combined with ugli makes "Matrimony", the base
of all wedding punch drinks in Christian Jamaica. My field station
there in the 1960's and early 70's made me appreciate the Arawak
selection of caimito that the modern Jamaicans have, along the Mosquito
Coast, mixed with the Central America selections spread south by
pre-Colombian coastal trade. the selections get larger as you go south
on the Mosquito Coast trade route.
The Jamaican forms brought
recently to Belize, Livingston, Guatemala, Bluefields, Nicaragua, and
Limon Castle, Puerto Rico, are sometimes hybridized with those good
pre- Columbian selections at these ancient Indian towns renamed by the
Jamaicans and Spanish. Just south of Limon, the largest caimito can be
found, and it is brought to Limon's and sometimes San Jose's fruit
markets. We call it the "Puerto Viejo" and it's the size of a
grapefruit. They came in the dark, plum-skinned type and the albino,
green- skinned type, and we grow the four best varieties of them here
at Big Pine where they and the native satinleaf both grow ideally. My
fine Cuban caimitos will, no doubt, hybridize with them as the native
dilly has with our Cuban sapodilla selections the Indians made us and
dropped off here on the Habafia-St. Augustine canoe trade route long
before the English-speaking peoples ever came to this new old place on
the Western Atlantic.
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