Zill Dark

'Zill Dark' is the best-documented purple-fruited Surinam cherry in the United States and the only one that has been used as a parent in published research. Trade accounts credit Dorothy Zill, of the Zill nursery family in Boynton Beach, Florida, with singling the plant out and asking that it be rescued when an older nursery property was sold to developers; the grower who saved it named it 'Zill Dark', and a nursery labelling error later pushed the same clone into circulation as plain "Black Surinam Cherry", a confusion that persists today. Griffis and colleagues at Florida Gulf Coast University, Florida Southern College and the University of Hawai'i built their purple-pitanga commercialization program around it, repeatedly self-pollinating a grafted plant and growing the seedlings out at Lakeland, Florida and at the Kona Experiment Station; roughly 75 percent of the Florida seedlings and more than 90 percent of the Hawai'i seedlings came out purple-fruited, which is why seed sold as 'Zill Dark' is described as coming largely true. It is also the clone chosen for veneer-graft trials after cuttings proved impossible to root. For home growers it is the dark Surinam cherry most reliably offered as a grafted, ready-to-fruit plant, and the benchmark other dark selections are measured against.