The latest issue of "Fruit Gardener" just arrived (September/October 2001, vol. 33, #5; California Rare Fruit Growers). It has 2 good articles on persimmons, one by David Karp (the author of the recent Los Angeles Time article on peaches that I posted a link for some weeks ago), plus an article on the (native) American Persimmon, Diospyros Virginiana. The latter are small, mostly wild, highly astringent unless very ripe, but good when fully ripe. Another article in the same issue describes a "fruit tour" of Frank Sekiya's plant nursery on Oahu (Hawaii). The following is from that article (p. 6): "Not far from the cacao stood a Keppel fruit tree, Stelchocarpus burakol. Its fruit were not yet ripe, so I didn't get to try one. This was unfortunate for me; I wanted to see what the fruit was like because it is known less for its taste than its effect: after eating Keppel fruit, one's bodily excretions reportedly smell like violets." California Rare Fruit Growers are at http://www.crfg.org PS better to smell like violets than durian. :-) Tom Billings