Supreme and Darlene are both newer varieties with really great fruit from everything I've read. The NC Coop Ext Serv mentioned several of the other new varieties including Supreme, for people to try. They are making recommendations not just for home growers with a few vines, but also for farmers that are planting many acres of vines, so they don't recommend new varieties until there is lots of experience with them. Darlene is a patented variety from a grower in middle Georgia. Having lived in Macon, GA for several years, I can swear that it is hotter than hades. Plants developed for summers with triple digit temps and dew points near 90 are not the first ones that come to mind for cold hardiness, although heat and cold tolerance are not always mutually exclusive. From what I've read about both Supreme and Darlene, they both produce really great fruit when they've got the right conditions, but there seems to be some question of what those conditions are. Researchers are getting conflicting results with great crops in some places and not-so-great in others. Some confusion from the test plots is that there is no clear indication of why they have not done well in the areas where they have not. One of the reasons it is so great to grow our own fruits is that we can grow varieties that produce great fruit in our location, even though that variety may not function well for commercial growers elsewhere. Another website that has really detailed information on all kinds of fruit including muscadines, is the small fruit growers consortium. They consolidate information from lots of the state Coop Ext Services along with commercial growers experience with fruits. Here is a link that might be useful: other muscadine varities

ralph: You won't damage a healthy, well established grape no matter how hard you prune it. But if you prune off all of this yrs growth, you won't get any fruit next yr. You would get a great crop the following yr. So what you need to do is remove as much as possible of the two yr and older wood while saving some long shoots with current season growth. By doing this carefully you can get a crop every yr and still remove all the older wood after 2-3 yrs. After you get it pruned back you will need to prune every yr. If you aren't going to prune every yr you might as well not bother, just live with an overgrown vine. The Fruitnut

Ulf Nordfjell's garden a Tribute to Linnaeus that won a gold medal in 2007 was transplanted to the Gothenburg Botanical Garden after the show and looks just as good there after four years. But it was a very Swedish garden so the plants came home to their own soil and climate. I had a chuckle over a comment by a British garden columnist that Nordfjell's spruce hedge was a modern feature. It is such a traditional wind break that it went out of fashion here 50 years ago. There is one from 1936 on my block, probably one of the last in existence. Wisley is educational and inspirational but it is not beautiful. The overall design is dull. The elements don't hang together at all. I was surprised that even Penelope Hobhouse's garden there was so uninteresting, as I admire her books. I felt like a German lady on a garden tour I guided for the German Rose Society in the south of Sweden. We visited a large country garden full of roses but her verdict was "Beautiful roses but not a beautiful garden". I don't think design was a major question at Wisley, it has a different purpose. I enjoyed the visit to Wisley and I learnt a lot about staking plants from the long border, not that we need to stake plants much. Our delphiniums are not overfed and we have little wind in summer so generally manage without staking. The trial fields were a revelation and I made notes frantically. That year delphiniums and sweet peas happened to be on trial, two of my favourite plants.

I've heard of people growing star fruit in micro-climates around the Tampa area. I would think that you'd have no problems with Tropic Beauty and UFO peaches there, as they seem to bloom with very few chill hours. Any pomegranate that can handle humidity well. Loquats are another one, and a few mail order nurseries down south Florida do sell grafted cultivars. You could also look into figs, red and yellow strawberry guavas, olives, carob, avocados, and passiflora. I grow about three different varieties of passiflora here, mostly non-edible ones, but since you're nearly a full zone warmer than me, you could grow even more varieties than I do. Some of the subtropicals to consider are: green and white sapote, lychee, longans, Jaboticaba. There is a somewhat cold hardy variety of jackfruit called Black Gold that you may be able to grow too. Some people here have said that their trees have handled 28 degrees or below with no damage at all, but you can always keep them pruned at about 8-12' and cover them if it gets any cooler. I am definitely not an expert in subtropicals. So, do your research before going out and buying anything based on what I've said. Looking up a USDA zone, like from Dave's Garden, only tells you part of the story. There are 10 degree (in Fahrenheit) with every full USDA zone, or 5 in every half (A or B) zone. Just because a tree is listed as zone 9b, for example, which means it can get anywhere between 25 and 30 degrees in the winter or early spring, it doesn't mean that that specific tree will survive at 25 degrees. It just means it should be hardier than the next half zone. A mature tree of a specific type, for example, may only survive to 28 degrees. Also, information out there varies widely, which means there is a lot of misinformation. For example, some websites are stating that longan is more cold hardy than Lychee, which probably survive somewhere between 25 and 28 degrees, whereas other sites are stating that longan gets damaged at 40 degrees. Similarly, Biriba supposedly gets damaged at 55 degrees, according to one site, and 26 degrees on another. On yet another site, biriba is killed at 28 degrees and damaged at 32. Some on this forum have also had Atemoya survive at 25 degrees unprotected. Atemoya would be a good choice if you lived too far north to do sugar apples, custard apples, and biriba yet too far south to grow paw paws. I have no doubts that, with experimentation, certain cultivars of paw paws (asimina triloba) could be fruited in 9b or 10, but to create something commercially available, people have to push the southern limits of known cultivars and possibly bring in new planting materials from various parts of the US, like Eric Duckworth did when he brought in seedlings from Louisiana. After finding suitable candidates for breeding stock, they would then have to be bred by the thousands, to select the best cultivars, for vigor, fruit size, productivity, flavor, higher flesh to seed ratios, and of course, to minimize the bad aftertaste that many people complain about. Since the UF or any other larger organizations are not doing any experiments, to create paw paw cultivars that would do well in central Florida, or between zones 9b and 10a, it's all up to hobbyists, to push those growing limits. Hopefully, with some successes, those hobbyists would be willing to share their seeds and scion wood, to further advance the cause. How long it takes, I do not know. I've seen paw paws from certain areas actually go into bloom by 3-4 years of age, and I've seen some only bloom at upwards of 15 years. If every paw paw seedling produced viable seeds within 5 years, we probably would see major progress within the next 10 to 15 years. One of the breeders that is pushing the northern limits of the paw paw range actually mentioned that his seedlings take about 11 years to mature. So, there are too many variables to even attempt to predict these things. I can almost guarantee that there will be new, commercial cultivars in your zone, ones that are grown and bred in Florida, but just don't know when. Probably more than you wanted to know, but it's interesting stuff.