Cherokee Purple

Cherokee Purple produces large fruit, typically twelve to sixteen ounces, with dusky pink skin darkened by purple shoulders and a flavor described as full, complex, and slightly sweet. Slice one open and the interior is a deep, almost blackish red, extremely juicy, with small seeds suspended in green gel scattered irregularly through the flesh. The stem-end shoulders often stay green even at full ripeness, and after an early flush of large, irregularly shaped fruit the plants settle into producing more globular tomatoes. Dense, regularly spaced foliage tends to curl upward, and early fruit is prone to cat-facing, a pitted, sometimes discolored deformity linked to incomplete fertilization.

Its dense, juicy flesh makes Cherokee Purple a favored slicing tomato for sandwiches and salads, particularly BLTs. Beyond fresh eating, it also finds its way into pizza and pasta sauces.

In garden trials, Cherokee Purple shows notable disease tolerance: early blight left barely a mark on it, and it escaped the anthracnose and Septoria leaf spot that damaged other varieties nearby, though late blight eventually took it as it does most tomatoes in blight-prone seasons. Grown under favorable conditions with a long season, it is a good producer for an heirloom, averaging some twenty or more fruits per plant. Its vines grow vigorously enough that they benefit from sturdy staking or caging.

Cherokee Purple traces to seeds John "J. D." Green of Sevierville, Tennessee mailed in 1990 to tomato historian Craig LeHoullier; Green had received them a few years earlier, in 1986-1987, from a Rutledge, Tennessee neighbor, Jean Greenlee, whose grandfather had in turn gotten the tomato from the Cherokee roughly a century before that exchange. LeHoullier named the variety and passed seeds to Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, whose owner privately admitted the tomato "tasted fine, but was kind of ugly" even as the company became the first to sell it commercially, in a limited 1993 release.