Meiwa Kumquat

The Meiwa kumquat is the sweet one, the kumquat you can pop whole into your mouth and eat skin and all. A small, tidy, evergreen citrus, Fortunella crassifolia carries round, bright orange fruit a little over an inch across, and where most kumquats offer a sweet rind wrapped around sharply sour pulp, the Meiwa softens the contrast: the peel is thick and honey-sweet, the flesh only mildly tart, so the whole fruit eats like candy off the branch.

Kumquats belong to the rue and citrus family, Rutaceae, and hail from southern China, where they have been grown for centuries; the Meiwa is a naturally occurring hybrid of the round and oval kumquats, long cultivated in the Zhejiang province of China and in Japan, where the fruit is prized above all others for eating fresh. In spring, and often again through the warm season, the glossy little tree covers itself in small white flowers of intense, sweet citrus fragrance, a pleasure in their own right before the fruit ever sets.

As citrus go, kumquats are the hardiest and most forgiving, and the Meiwa is no exception, taking cold into the low twenties that would ruin an orange and thriving in a large pot as readily as in the ground. The compact, eight-to-twelve-foot habit, dense, rounded, and evergreen, makes the plant as ornamental as it is productive, and the fruit holds for weeks on the branch, glowing orange against the dark leaves through winter. Woodlanders' stock has shown strong growth here in Aiken, South Carolina.

Grow the Meiwa kumquat in full sun and well-drained soil, in the ground where winters are mild or in a container that can shelter from hard frost farther north, and site the tree where the winter fruit and the fragrant spring flowers can be enjoyed close at hand, by a door, a patio, or a sunny wall. Few plants are so generous: evergreen structure, sweet perfume, and a long crop of the one citrus you can eat whole, straight from the branch.