Bell apple

The water lemon, or bell apple, is a passionflower vine climbing to 10 m or more³. Its fragrant flowers, 7.4 to 10 cm across, have red or purple-red sepals and petals and a fringe of filaments banded with red, blue, purple and white³. The fruit is egg-shaped or ellipsoid, 5 to 8 cm long and orange-yellow, held at the base by three large leafy bracts; inside a leathery rind is a translucent, nearly white pulp, rose-scented and pleasantly subacid, full of seeds³. People make a hole in one end and suck out the pulp and seeds, and the strained juice makes a drink³. The rind, leaves and seeds contain a cyanogenic glycoside³.

English speakers call it bell-apple and golden apple, among other names; in the French West Indies it is pomme d’or, pomme liane or pomme de liane³. Golden apple is also a name of Spondias dulcis⁴, the golden apple of this guide.

Morton found it common, wild and cultivated, from southern Venezuela and the Guianas through the Amazon region of Brazil to Peru, and naturalised from Trinidad and Barbados to Cuba; it reached Malaya in the eighteenth century³. Kew gives its native range as the Caribbean to northern and north-eastern Brazil².

Where the sources disagree

• Native range. Kew counts the Caribbean in its native range²; Morton describes it there as cultivated and naturalised, and common in the wild from Venezuela to Peru³.