Vermillion

'Vermillion' is the best known of the named red-fruited Surinam cherries, and one of the few selections offered as a grafted plant on the West Coast — Papaya Tree Nursery in southern California lists grafted 'Vermillion' alongside grafted 'Lolita', and Trade Winds Fruit notes it as an example of the named varieties that bear red rather than dark fruit. It matters because the overwhelming majority of Surinam cherry in cultivation is unselected red seedling material with sour, resinous fruit; 'Vermillion' is one of the few red clones anyone bothered to name and propagate vegetatively. California growers who have fruited it since the late 2000s rate it highly, with one ranking it the best of the several Surinam cherries they had tried, ahead of a dark-fruited plant at a local botanic garden. Documentation is thinner than for the Florida purple cultivars — there is no published description with fruit weights or Brix — so treat the flavour reports as grower experience rather than trial data. For gardeners in Mediterranean California it is the practical named option, since the dark Florida cultivars are rarely shipped west.