At the Sarasota County UF/IFAS Extension Office, we’ve been cultivating a Food Forest to showcase the most productive, unique, and often underutilized fruits and crops suited to our distinctive southwest Florida climate. Through this project, we aim to inspire and educate our community by offering a firsthand look at these remarkable trees, shrubs, and vines, allowing visitors to sample flavors before purchasing, and providing opportunities to gather seeds and cuttings.
To deepen community engagement, we’re launching a monthly blog series that will highlight the best edible plants to harvest each month. While some trees are still maturing and may take a few years to reach full production, we invite you to visit anytime and enjoy the fruits that are ready now. Come experience the abundance and potential of local, sustainable gardening that can be added into your landscape. Nothing will be fresher or more fulfilling than something you grow and pick yourself!
If you’ve ever eaten a lychee and liked it, you’ll likely enjoy it’s cousin the longan (Dimocarpus longan) too — peel back the tan, leathery shell and you get the same translucent white pulp wrapped around a single glossy brown seed, which is exactly where the Chinese name long yan, or “dragon eye,” comes from, an apt description once the peel comes off, especially if you cut the fruit in half. Longan won’t win the beauty contest, though: lychee’s ruby-red, bumpy skin is one of the most striking things you can put in a fruit bowl, while longan looks like a small brown marble by comparison, and the pulp itself is a bit less sweet and more musky, described by UF/IFAS as sweet, earthy, and textured rather than the brighter flavor of a good lychee. But if you only have room for one of these trees, longan is the one to plant.
Ten years ago lychee was an easy recommendation for a Suncoast dooryard; that changed in 2018, when the lychee erinose mite (Aceria litchii) turned up on Pine Island in Lee County. It’s an eriophyid mite — among the smallest arthropods that feed on plants, invisible without magnification — that attacks immature leaves, stems, panicles, flower buds, and fruit, first raising small haired blisters that turn reddish-brown and curl the leaves as the infestation builds, and it can unfortunately cut lychee fruit production by up to 80%. It has spread widely across Florida and needs extreme measures like complete defoliation to eradicate temporarily. Even then it seems to quickly recolonize the trees after a year or two.
The Tree
Longan is a symmetrical evergreen with dense, dark green foliage and a round to oblong crown. In south Florida, trees typically reach 30–40 feet in height and width. The pinnately compound leaves are dark green, shiny, and leathery, up to 12 inches long.
Left alone it’s a full-sized shade tree. Kept the way UF/IFAS recommends for the home landscape — 10 to 15 feet high and 15 to 30 feet wide — it’s easier to care for and harvest, and far less likely to topple in a storm. That’s the shape most people want anyway: a low, wide, spreading canopy you can pick from the ground. One honest warning from our Miami-Dade colleagues: longan can be difficult to prune, as it tends to put out a lot of upright growth — remove the strong verticals and encourage laterals. Start that training early.
Bloom is a spring event. Panicles are terminal, 4 to 18 inches long, erect and widely branched, and the main bloom season runs from February/March through April and into early May. Harvest is mid-July to early September, but mainly August.
Suncoast Plantings
Longan is well adapted to subtropical areas with a cool, nonfreezing fall and winter, and it produces most reliably where low nonfreezing temperatures (59°F or below) coincide with a dry fall/winter period. Warm spring temperatures followed by hot summers and adequate soil moisture are ideal for fruit development. This growing seasons fits south and central Florida’s climate very well. Along the Suncoast this tree thrives. Far inland it should be noted that Longan is slightly less cold tolerant than lychee. Young trees suffer severe damage at 29–31°F and may be killed at 26–28°F. Older trees are tougher, but branches are injured at 25–26°F, with very severe damage or death below 24°F.
Sourcing Longans
This bears repeating for almost every fruit crop we cover, and longan is no exception. Longan can be grown from seed, but cultivars do not come true from seed, seedlings may be slow to bear, and the fruit is often of inferior quality. Seedlings are useful for breeding selections and rootstocks — that’s about it. Air layering is the standard propagation method in Florida, best done April through August, with roots forming in 10 to 12 weeks. Grafting by side veneer or cleft onto seedling rootstock also works but is less common.
Life most fruit trees propagation method is also time. Air-layered trees may bear 2 to 3 years after planting; seedling trees may take up to 6 years — and at the end of that wait you may well have a tree not worth keeping. Buy a named, vegetatively propagated tree unless you are experimenting and have land and time for those endeavors.
Cultivars for the Suncoast
There are numerous longan cultivars worldwide, but only 30 to 40 are grown commercially. In Florida, 99% of the acreage is planted to ‘Kohala’ — a Hawaiian selection introduced to south Florida in 1954. Other cultivars have been introduced and evaluated, including ‘Chompoo’, ‘Haew’, and ‘Biew Kiew’. Two cultivars I am interested in personally are ‘Edau’ (‘Daw’) and ‘Diamond River’, newer cultivars that are supposed to be better for yearly uniform fruit set. But this isn’t well tested in Florida and I haven’t found them locally.
At our demonstration gardens we already have a ‘Biew Kiew’ in the ground — a Thai cultivar rated medium-to-large fruit with good to very good quality, ripening late July into September. ‘Kohala’ is going in next, so visitors can taste the gold standard against a newer challenger.
We also have a ‘Red’ longan, the red-foliaged type with red new growth and red fruit. It’s a genuinely striking plant just as an ornamental — but the fruit quality is poor from what I have seen. We keep it as an ornamental and a experimental specimen, not as something we’d recommend you plant for eating.
Feast or Famine Yields
One last thing to set expectations. Longan is an erratic bearer, and that isn’t a cultivar problem you can shop your way out of. UF/IFAS names reliable bearing as the major production problem for longan worldwide, and lists every cultivar in the Florida table — ‘Kohala’ included — as “erratic.” Trees bear not every year, and in some years little to no fruit is produced. Yields from individual mature trees may range from 50 pounds one year to over 500 pounds another year.
Lychee behaves the same way, so this isn’t a strike against longan specifically — it’s the nature of these fruits in our Florida climate. Plan for it. In a big year you’ll be giving fruit away or freezing it by the grocery sack. Fresh fruit only holds 5 to 7 days in the refrigerator, so have a plan before the harvest hits.
If you get a heavy set, thin it. Panicles carrying 150 or more fruit usually produce small fruit; removing about half the set fruit in spring, when fruit are ¼ to ½ inch in diameter, results in a large increase in fruit size. Which makes for higher quality fruit.
Resources
- UF/IFAS Longan Growing in the Florida Home Landscape: https://ask.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/MG049
- UF/IFAS Gardening Solutions on Longan: https://gardeningsolutions.ifas.ufl.edu/plants/edibles/fruits/longan/
- UF/IFAS Charlotte County Blog on Longan: https://blogs.ifas.ufl.edu/charlotteco/2024/04/30/alternative-fruit-the-longan/
- Growables Longan Page: https://www.growables.org/information/TropicalFruit/longan.htm
During the preparation of this work, the author used AI to help build and refine the blog post. After using this tool/service, the author reviewed and edited the content, and takes full responsibility for the content of the publication.
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