Many ripe fruits have a delicious scent — strawberry, mango, pineapple, peach and tomato, to name a few favourites — but tamarillo has a heady perfume when the plant flowers.
It’s a real surprise to smell such an exotic perfume wafting through the vegie patch and discover its source is the clusters of pendulous pink-white flowers on the tamarillo.
Tamarillo — equally well known as tree tomato — is an ungainly plant: tall, reaching around 3m, with many branches and very large, dark-green, heart-shaped leaves.
It’s also brittle, its branches easily broken by the wind (or by a possum, should it decide to climb the