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I was traveling to the DC area this week and visited a local park in Maryland. I noticed the park had a large Poncirus trifoliata / Flying Dragon tree with hundreds of oranges on it. The fruit is small (about the size of a tangerine) and gives off a very intense aroma. It's like a deep spicy citrus smell. The peel is also furry with a velvet like feel to it. It's pretty unique. I've only seen one of these growing in Michigan and it was very small and hardly fruit bearing but I attribute this to a lack of care. After reading different reports, some selections of Poncirus trifoliata seedlings are reported to be cold hardy to -28.9C / -20F.

I plucked 5 oranges and brought them home with me. This morning I squeezed them and got about 1/3 of a shot glass full of juice. It was very bitter (more bitter than a yellow grapefruit) but not overbearingly bitter and highly acidic. The fruit also had lots of seeds. I counted out 177 seeds total (35 per orange average) and plan to begin stratifying them. I'll use these for rootstock and maybe I'll get lucky and get a genetic oddity.

Although Flying Dragon is edible, the taste isn't anything special or even pleasant. The fact that it's cold hardy and disease resistant are the only pros that make it worth growing in my opinion.

Nice! Thanks for posting about this fruit. I had to look up online, never seen them before.

For sure! I don't believe it's very common in your state. I know it's also considered an invasive species in some regions.

Fun fact: About 1 hour after drinking that small glass of juice I completely lost my voice. This has literally never happened in my entire life. I think the high acid in the juice is the probable cause that did it. I'll try to collect some more to determine if it happens again

Despite this, I still hold that Flying Dragon is worth growing for:

1. Disease resistant rootstock
2. Cross breeding to develop new cold hardy cultivars
3. Beekeeping in colder zones

That is the root stock that my Improved Meyer lemon came on. I was reading that a lot of people hate it as a root stock. I tried rooting the root stock from suckers, very difficult and slow to root.

On very interesting. I've read mostly positive things about Flying Dragon used as a rootstock. Were the negatives that you read geared towards difficult and slow rooting or were there other undesired results from using Flying Dragon as a rootstock?

Lower production, smaller fruit size, in some cases lower quality fruit https://crec.ifas.ufl.edu/extension/cit ... ngbing.pdf

It's very sensitive to poor drainage, it picky about having a certain PH, It has no drought tolerance, it also works better as a root stock for orange than it does for other citrus, it's incompatible with Eureka lemon, Look at page 11 here https://citrusaustralia.com.au/wp-conte ... stocks.pdf

There is testing of hybrids made with Flying Dragon, some seem promising https://citrusrootstocks.org/wp-content ... cation.pdf