The first D11 that dropped in my greenhouse fooled me. No stench rolled out to announce it, so I found the fruit sitting on the floor by sight rather than
Picking a durian is the part beginners skip and then regret. The husk gives away almost nothing to an untrained eye, so people grab the biggest fruit
Chanee announces itself before you see it. Open one in a closed greenhouse and the garlic-and-onion note hangs in the air for an hour, which is exactly
Durian splits a room faster than anything else I grow. I have watched a first-time visitor gag at the smell from across the yard, then watched the friend
Half the fun of durian is the naming, and D15 is a small lesson in how tangled it gets. The fruit most Malaysian stalls sell as D15 is really Chanee, a
Bite into a well-made fried durian ball and the shell shatters over a cold, custard center that most first-timers swear is ice cream. Heat does something
Every durian region has its old workhorses, the clones that built the industry before the celebrity varieties arrived, and D96 is one of them.
If you assumed the S in S17 marks a Sabah durian from Borneo, you have plenty of company, and you are still mistaken. The letter is a grading badge, not
Some durians are named to sell, and D78 is one of them. The trade calls it Sweetie, a name that promises a sugar bomb and sets up a lot of first-timers
The first thing anyone notices about a D158 is the stem. It runs so long, sometimes close to a foot, that the fruit looks like it arrived with a built-in handle.