Darwin Botanic Gardens

Went on holiday recently, didn't expect to have anything to do with my chocolate obsession but I ran into a tree, literally, in the kids play section of the Darwin Botanic Gardens. This section is really cool withtree house and littlethings like a hedge maze andvariaous contraptions to climb on and also a selection of tropical food trees for kids to learn about, bananas, cacao, papaya, etc. The cacao treeis quite a big tree, that looks like it was planted and left to just do its thing, unpruned and with many suckers from the central stem. Pictures are uploaded on my page on thechocolatelife. Anyway I knicked a fruit (sorry botanic gardens but it was for educational purposes), looks like it is an unusual variety judging by the high percentage of white beans in the pod. I was quite surprised actually as the stock I would have thought would have been Papua New Guinean hybrid. These have big wrinkly pods with quite strikingly purple almost blackbeans (see the other album I created for my Mossman trip). The taste of the beans from Mossman is very astringent and the pulp very sweet and fruity, I made chocolate from the beans there at the same time and it was intriguing that I was able to detect the same flavour notes in the finished chocolate as in the fresh bean and pulp. The Darwin beans were much more mild and the pulp not as tart, which makes sense seeing the lack of tanins in the beans. This got me thinking though, given that this Darwin tree is growing in a big pile of sand, whether the soil type has an effect on the tanin or polyphenol levels in the beans? Is the soil it is growing in in some part responsible for the pink and white beans, would they be purple in a different soil type? Along the lines of this thought I turned up this article abstract: http://resources.metapress.com/pdf-preview.axd?code=816k218llgph3055&size=largest

There is another plantation near Darwin at the Coastal Plains Research Farm at Humpty Doo, if this is like the test plantation in Mossman FNQ then it has quite a few different varieties and perhaps it came from one of their trees.I am enquiring with the Darwin Botanic Gardens on whether they have any more info on the tree. Just to explain, a number of research plantations were set up something like 10-15 years ago to determine the best cacao growing region in Australia - Mossman won.

If there is any chocolate maker living in Darwin, they should get permission to harvest and collect the pods, ferment and make chocolate from the tree - I would. With a little pruning to open up the canopy the amount of fruit that could be harvested from this tree in one go would be enough to ferment on a small scale I would think.

Well, those are my musings on the tree in the Darwin Botanic Gardens.