Miracle Fruit
Synsepalum dulcificum
a.k.a. Miracle Berry
A relatively tasteless berry with an amazing side-effect. After eating one miracle fruit, sour things will instantly taste sweet. Eating even the sourest of lemons, one will taste only sugary sweetness. The effect lasts an hour or two. The miracle fruit is a remarkable natural sweetener that is virtually unknown to much of the world.

Berries are eaten fresh. Africans sometimes use the fruits to improve the taste of stale food. Fruits are being investigated as a possible source for a natural food sweetener.

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General information and cultivation

General information and cultivation

The plant grows best at a pH as low as 4.5 to 5.8, in an environment free from frost and in partial shade with high humidity. The miracle fruit grows well with blueberries. Without the use of plant hormones the seeds have a 24% sprouting success rate.^{[citation needed]} The plants take between eight and ten years to bear fruit, but treatments for commercial crops can reduce gestation to less than four years.^{[citation needed]}

The Miracle Fruits plant

The Miracle Fruit Plant, sometimes known as Miraculous Berry, (Sideroxylon dulcificum/Synsepalum dulcificum) is a plant first documented by an explorer named Des Marchais during a 1725 excursion to its native West Africa. Marchais noticed that local tribes picked the berry from shrubs and chewed it before meals. The plant grows in bushes up to 20 feet high in its native habitat, but does not usually grow higher than five feet in cultivation, and it produces two crops per year, after the end of the rainy season. It is an evergreen plant that produces small red berries, with flowers that are white and which are produced for many months of the year. The seeds are about the size of coffee beans.