Name: Carambola or star fruit.

Botanical name:Averrhoa carambola.

Description: Believed to have originated in Malaysia, the carambola is a small tree with a dense canopy, tiny flowers and golden, five-sided fruit. It grows well in South Florida, and often produces more crisp, sweet-tart fruit than you can use.

In his 1920 Manual of Tropical and Subtropical Fruits, plant explorer Wilson Popenoe wrote that the star fruit was ''not so highly esteemed'' in America as in the Far East. Chinese and Hindus, he said, ate the fruit when green as a vegetable and when golden ripe as a dessert.

For many years, the only thing Americans did with it was slice it to resemble stars and float it in punch bowls. Today we have carambola wine, sophisticated recipes and an expanded list of cultivars -- not only Arkin and Fwang Tung, which have been grown here since the 1960s, but also Kary, Bell and Thayer, among others.

Height: 30 feet.

Light: Full sun.

Culture: Give this tree a moderate amount of moisture (twice weekly is plenty) and fertilizer two or three times a year. Yellow leaves signal the tree's need for chelated iron in our rocky soils. Use controlled-release fertilizer or a fruit tree fertilizer such as 8-3-10. Judicious pruning will keep the canopy open. You also may want to remove many of the smaller fruit to keep the branches from breaking.

Charles Boning in Florida's Best Fruiting Plants writes that carambolas don't like wet feet or constantly damp soils. I've found that lobate lac scale attacks carambola, but that the trees can tolerate the insects. If you treat the scale with Bayer's Advanced Tree and Shrub Insect Killer, you should not eat the fruit for a year.

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