Tree‑Crops & Heritage Seedlings

The largest edible fruit native to North America, and the only temperate member of a tropical family (Annonaceae). The fruit is custard-textured, tasting of banana, mango, and pineapple at once — the “Hoosier banana.” Pawpaw is a clonal, patch-forming understory tree: left alone it spreads by root suckers into a thicket — so be prepared to mow around it, or be happy with a “PawPaw Patch!” Hershey's circle still makes pawpaw mead from the Downingtown trees, and the fruit is good enough that there's a real case for a local pawpaw festival.

Hershey hunted down honey locusts with the sweetest pods and the fewest thorns, and grafted them forward. The pods of his selections run to roughly 35% sugar — “pigs will sell their souls for these things,” as Dale Hendricks puts it in the Philadelphia magazine profile of Hershey — and he aimed for a “kinder, gentler honey locust… without thorns so long they pop tractor tires.” These are open-pollinated seedlings from that improved stock: fast, tough, and forgiving, though seedlings can throw thorns and variable pod-sugar, so graft the best later if you want certainty.

The “Kingnut” — the largest nut of any North American hickory, and the largest native nut on the continent. These seedlings are grown from improved cultivar genetics (open-pollinated nuts from grafted orchards) selected for crackability, size, flavor, and productivity — the Pennsylvania lineage of Fayette Etter selections: Fayette, Hoffeditz, Henry, Keystone, Stauffer, Longenecker, Parker. A majestic, slow, long-lived bottomland tree — the one you plant for your grandchildren.

A hican is a hickory × pecan hybrid — the name is literally hickory + pecan. The nuts are often larger than either parent and easier to shell than pure hickory, with a flavor poised between the two. This lineage runs through the famous named hicans — McAllister (shellbark × pecan, long billed as “the largest nut in North America”), Burton and Dooley Burton (shagbark backcrosses), Bixby, Fairbanks, Beaver. There's a lovely local thread here: a towering McAllister hican stands in Hershey's old Downingtown food forest in the Philadelphia magazine profile — the very same shellbark×pecan cross your seedling descends from.

Diospyros means “food of the gods.” Hershey ran contests for the best-tasting persimmons and grafted the winners forward; the persimmons in his Downingtown food forest still drop their fruit from August into November — “we pick them up off the ground,” and the surplus becomes mead. These are seedlings from that improved selection: sweet and luscious when fully soft-ripe (mouth-puckeringly astringent before), and bred toward reliable ripening this far north.

The Appalachian pioneer that fixes its own nitrogen. Robinia pseudoacacia is a true legume with active Rhizobium nodules on its roots — the distinction the honey-locust profile above is at pains to make. Its gift to a planting is fourfold: it grows hard on poor ground, it puts nitrogen into the soil where its roots reach, its dense rot-resistant heartwood becomes fenceposts that outlast pressure-treated lumber by decades, and its late-May flower racemes drive one of the strongest spring honey flows in North America. Here it's grown as a nurse tree for the slow climax canopy — paired tightest with hickory and walnut — and as a coppice rotation for fenceposts on the agroforestry sites Cedar Water is developing in South Jersey.