Sugar Dragon

Sugar Dragon began as Paul Thomson's clone 8-S and was renamed by California growers once its sugar content became the talking point; Spicy Exotics describes it as a hybrid of Hylocereus guatemalensis with another, unidentified species. It is the sweetest cultivar in general circulation, tested at 18 Brix on first fruiting in 2019 and reported into the low twenties on mature plants. The fruit is small — a quarter to three-quarters of a pound — which is exactly why it is not a commercial variety and exactly why home growers plant it. Its second role is as a pollen donor: it is self-fertile and its pollen works on virtually any other dragon fruit, so a single plant can service a whole trellis of self-sterile Thomson hybrids. It is also typically the first and the last cultivar to bloom in a season, extending the flowering window at both ends.