After planting our first five acre tropical fruit grove in 1989, we started reading about lychees grown in China and Australia. We wanted to find another kind of lychee to grow here in the United States and we discovered some that seemed promising. Our plan was to import 18 lychee air layers from a farm in Australia, comprising 6 different varieties, 3 of each variety. After a harrowing ordeal with USDA in Miami, who insisted that the roots and spaghnum would have to be stripped from the pencil size branches, we took the airlayers back to our farm, planted them in 3 gallon pots, placed them in our mist house and hoped for the best.  Surprisingly, most of the trees survived and grew alongside hundreds of our Mauritius lychees, also in containers.  USDA visited annually to check on those newly imported trees. We hoped to plant them out one day to see which varieties thrived and had the best fruiting characteristics, but it seemed Hurricane Andrew had other plans for those trees. The storm hit and many of the those potted plants were scattered and destroyed. Our home, built in the middle of the grove, lost part of it's roof, the windows and doors were damaged and our five year old lychee grove looked like an empty parking lot. There was so much work to be done to rebuild. We just assumed that the Australian lychee airlayers were history.

     After that ferocious storm, while cleaning up all the debris, we found hundreds of lychee trees in pots lying underneath the huge pine trees that had fallen from the neighbor’s yard. Amazingly, many of them had been spared destruction by the large branches that had sheltered them from the strong winds and protected them from the sun's heat. We cleaned up and with the surviving trees, replanted five acres of Mauritius lychees. Some of those potted trees we sold to another grower who was also replanting.

     Time went by and one evening, as we drove the golf cart through that newly planted grove plucking luscious pieces of fruit from the trees, we noticed one tree that was bigger than all the rest. We tasted the fruit from that tree and remember how surprised we were to find that every piece of fruit had such a small seed and the fruit itself seemed to be exceptionally sweet. Chalking it up to some botanical phenomenon that abhors consistency and favors variety (remember natural selection and evolution?), we didn't think much more about that particular tree until the following year.

     One day we got a phone call from the same grower who bought some of those post Hurricane Andrew lychee trees. "Oddly enough," he told us "out of all the trees you sold me, two of those trees were very unusual. They are very hearty, much bigger than the others and every piece of fruit has such a small seed and seems to taste very sweet".  At that moment we realized, "He has two.... and we have one..... and that makes three.”  One of the six different varieties we had brought in from Australia in 1989 must have been hearty enough to have survived the storm.

     Now the tree was out in the world and other growers wanted to know what the variety was. We would have gladly told them if we had known, but the storm took care of that......there wasn't much paperwork left and we couldn’t really remember what we had ordered. We just called them 'Sweethearts', mostly because they were large, heart shaped....... and deliciously sweet!