Plant · P-523

Miracle Fruit

Synsepalum dulcificum

Miracle Fruit is a slow-growing tropical shrub grown for a small red berry that contains no sugar but tricks the tongue into tasting sour food as sweet, an effect that lasts fifteen minutes to an hour after eating one. The berry is fragile and does not keep, so it is used where it is picked, to make sour fruit, unsweetened preserves or citrus taste sugared. It needs distinctly acid soil and cannot take frost or alkaline ground, so where winters freeze or soil runs alkaline it is best grown as a container plant kept under cover.