Just outside the Tropical Fruit Pavilion, a jackfruit tree has a
goodly number of enormous fruit still attached to its trunk.
It's worth seeking out just to marvel at the size of the fruit.
In his book Exploring for Plants, David Fairchild tells of
finding jackfruit the "universal" fruit of Ceylon (Sri Lanka)
markets in the mid-1920s. In the past, he said, he had found it
rather strong. When his host in Ceylon, Andreas Nell, boasted of
the superior qualities of a "honey jack,'' Fairchild wrote, "I
had never heard that there were distinct varieties of the
jackfruit, although of course such a thing was reasonable, so I
naturally wanted very much to taste one." It had to be halved
with a machete and then cut into segments. He pronounced that
the fruit had "an extremely rich sweet flavor." "We saved all
the seeds from this fruit and sent them to the Panama Canal Zone
and Honduras and Cuba and even to South Florida, where there was
already one jackfruit tree that had borne fruit." The gardens
that received them we