Exotic Fruit : It’s Rare, It’s Exotic, It’s From Granada Hills

David Silber still likes to talk about his first tropical fruit. In fact, he and his wife Tina named their Granada Hills nursery after it. And he has a photo album documenting his success with the babaco (pronounced ba-BAH-co) papaya.

In the album are many pictures of Silber, Zsa Zsa Gabor and babacos at a gala tropical-fruit event. In some of the pictures, Zsa Zsa holds the oblong green fruit, the size and shape of a skinny, fluted football. Silber says of Zsa Zsa: “She looks good there--she’s 70 years old, except, as you can see, she’s fat.”

About the babaco, however, Silber has nothing but good things to say. “Such an interesting fruit,” he exclaims. “It’s aromatic and tastes like a cross between a banana and a pineapple, only not as sweet. It needs sugar, but that’s OK. You can’t add flavor or aroma to a fruit, but you can add sugar. And there’s no waste with the babaco. It has no seeds and you can eat the skin. The plant is compact, but it’s a big producer.”

In another photo album, there are pictures of award-winning babaco pies and cakes and savory dishes that Tina created. When sliced, the deep-yellow babaco makes a pretty star shape with a hollow center that Tina often fills with deep-purple passion fruit.

These days, the babaco is only one of 65 rare and exotic plant species the Silbers propagate and grow at the Papaya Tree Nursery. This nursery/demonstration orchard is located in the yard around the Silbers’ white and gold-ocher ranch-style home. There is no sign outside, but those with an eye for unusual flora won’t find the place difficult to spot. In a neighborhood of lawns and shade trees and rose bushes, the Silbers’ is the only house surrounded by caper bushes, Persian mulberries, banana trees, tropical guavas and mango trees, with white bags covering the fruit.

David Silber, now in his 50s, gave up engineering at the peak of his career to raise rare tropical and sub-tropical plants. “I’m a kind of guy who likes to do his own thing,” he says. Deeply tanned, with curly silver hair and lively blue eyes, Silber greets his customers in gym shorts and a sweat shirt cut off way above the waist. He wears a toothpick behind his ear. He’s cheerful, chatty, philosophical, uninhibited--in the middle of a conversation, he’s likely to squat down suddenly and rock on his toes to stretch his troublesome back.

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“I like plants,” he says. “We were vegetable growers before, but all this started 14 years ago, when a neighbor gave us some cherimoya and guava plants--offbeat things. I joined the California Rare Fruit Growers, a club that provides information to growers. I’m a contributing editor with them now--I used to be a reader.”

In the kitchen, Silber slices off a wedge of pepino dulce , a pale-orange heart-shaped fruit with fuzzy purple stripes that has suffered, says Silber, from absolutely no promotion. Juicy, vaguely sweet, the pepino dulce tastes like a melon and is related to the tomato. “It’s good marinated in orange juice or served with prosciutto,” he says.

A scrub jay flies into the adjacent lanai , perches on a basket handle and stares expectantly at Silber. Silber calmly shakes chopped nuts from a can and scatters them on the TV tray near the basket.

As the jay eats his nuts, I’m given a chunk of ice cream banana, also called a blue Java, a thick, waxy-looking fruit that--although not as sweet as tiny supermarket manzano bananas--does indeed have good flavor and a dense, creamy texture. Silber next cuts into a purple passion fruit, which is commercially grown in Hawaii. The dark center looks like inky tapioca and has a very strong, very rich, slightly fetid flavor. Silber explains, “It’s used only as a condiment--it’s too strong to eat by itself.”

To counter the passion fruit, there’s the creamy, smooth, sweet white sapote from Mexico. “Mix it with ice, milk, a little sugar and you have an excellent milk shake,” says Silber.

Before we leave the kitchen to tour the grounds, there’s a slice of Dorset golden apple, a handsome, well-shaped yellow fruit with attractive, blushing shoulders, a beguiling crispness and friendly sweet taste.

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In general, Silber searches out high-quality, large-fruited species that grow well in Southern California. “Once I find a species, I develop mass propagation techniques, although mass, in my case, is probably seven or eight plants.” Silber laughs. “I’m inquisitive. More so than average. I want to know things. I’m in a restaurant shaking pepper on my food and I think, ‘Where does pepper come from? A tree? A bush?’ A vine, I find out. I do some research. I got some vines, but I killed them. . . . “

The Silbers’ yard is a pleasant mixture of orchard and nursery. There’s a small, tidy greenhouse and shade rooms for seedlings, cuttings and grafted cultivars. Throughout the yard, rows of trees and bushes in black plastic pots are clearly marked and priced. Trees, bushes and vines firmly rooted in the ground provide living proof that these rare and exotic species do indeed thrive in Southern California.

“The good thing about having a home demonstration orchard as well as a nursery,” Silber says, “is that customers can see what the plant looks like and what the fruit tastes like. Also, we sell the fruit at certified farmers markets, so that’s another source of income. And the orchard’s a source of food: We eat the fruit. And we eat a lot of fruit, all day long.”

Silber grows a productive Florida mango called Edward in containers; Edward, he claims, is one of the world’s best mangoes. We also pause before a California mango named Thompson, whose branches are loaded. “Look at those fruitskies,” says Silber.

We are joined intermittently on our tour by Tina, who gives cooking and preparation advice, and the scrub jay, who alights on nearby branches and flicks his tail to get our attention.

I learn that the gray-green, spoon-sized fruit I’d known all my life as a guava is the Brazilian fruit called feijoa . When the Silbers speak of guavas, they’re referring to large tropical varieties whose fruits ripen in the fall and come in three colors--white, “Red Indian” and magenta--and weigh up to a pound. “With green guavas,” Tina says, “I make an American ‘apple’ pie that’s just delicious. With ripe fruit, I make nectar with a little lemon juice, sugar and water. You can freeze the pulp.”

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The front yard is dominated by a large olive tree. Silber uses its limbs as support for three types of pitahaya plants. The pitahaya plants look like skinny, vine-like cacti; the fruit is smooth, petaled, not unlike a prickle-free cross between a prickly pear and an artichoke, only fluorescent red; inside, its berry-like meat is a deep-hot fuchsia.

The first fruit of the spring grows nearby on a large, dark and furry-leafed bushy tree: Big Jim loquats, the Silbers claim, grow as large as baseballs and taste like cherimoyas.

Also in the front yard are Persian mulberries, the pepino dulces (whose bushes do look like a cross between a tomato and a pepper), and Oro Blanco grapefruit from southeast Asia that both Tina and David Silber insist is the world’s best grapefruit.

On the side of the house, in raised beds, the Silbers grow six kinds of bananas that they believe are particularly well adapted to our Southern California climate: apple, Ice Cream, Dwarf Jamaican Red, Dwarf Brazilian, Dwarf Orinoco and Raja Puri, an Indian banana. Big clumps of hanging fruit are wrapped in blue plastic to protect them from the sun--the San Fernando Valley lacks the leaf cover of tropical forests.

In the back yard, longan and lychee trees grow under shade cloth along with allspice trees ( pimentas ), which are native to Jamaica. David crumples up a leaf. It smells like spice cake.

Surinam cherries, of which Silber seems quite fond, are adorably and perfectly fluted. They start out a tangerine orange and ripen into classic, black-red cherry-ness and look as pretty as something you’d pin on a hat. They don’t taste much like cherries, but have a thick, almost swampy flavor--and they don’t hold up well in cooking: You can’t make a pie from them, for example.

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Grumichama, a Brazilian cherry, is, according to Silber, even better than Bing: wine-y. But there are only a few on a plant and a potential customer is coming in the afternoon, so we’ll have to take his word for it.

Silber stops to sing the praises of Acerola cherries, originally from Barbados: “They’re the best source for Vitamin C. Put them in full sun. You’ll get a lot of cherries, five crops a year. You can eat them fresh; they’re sweet and delicious.”

Another item Silber likes to promote is the Miracle Fruit, a berry that, when chewed, makes acidic things, such as yogurt or lemon, taste sweet. “It’s physiological,” Silber explains. And, indeed, it works, only the sweetness is less like sugar and more like saccharin, and it lingers long after the thrill of sucking sweet lemons wears off--about an hour. Better yet, suck an actual sweet lemon, originally from Persia and now available in Granada Hills.

Eventually, Silber’s back begins to act up, and he gets’s a bit tired. Tina, watering nearby, is keeping a concerned eye on him. But the man’s interest in his work is virtually irrepressible. He talks on with enthusiasm, about grafting, about watering (bananas, and indeed, most tropicals, says Silber, require twice the water of citrus). He talks about his passion for plumerias, those beautiful waxy flowers so popularized by Hawaiian leis, and about the idiosyncrasies he encounters in propagating and caring for each plant. “Every tropical is a different story,” he says.

One last question: What is he working on now?

Silber frowns and removes the toothpick from behind his ear. “Sapodillas or Chicos from South America,” he says. “star fruit from India. Pawpaw from the American South.” (he sings a song about the pawpaw patch, then explains that pawpaws are “like cherimoyas, only better, and they’ve found an anti-cancer drug in the bark of the tree.”

He thinks some more. “Tree tomatoes or tamarillos . Pitahayas . Oh, and Chinese mulberries.” He pulls out another photograph album and shows me pictures of fruit that look like small clumps of rose-red brains. “I sold them at the farmers market and people came back for more,” he says.

He thinks some more. “Pineapples. Jack fruit. Egg fruit or canistel. Pistachios. . . . “

The list, he acknowledges, could go on forever.

Plants and price lists from: Papaya Tree Nursery, 12422 El Oro Way, Granada Hills, CA 91344. (818) 363-3680. 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily by appointment.