About
The Dwarf Tomato Project
Craig LeHoullier in the USA and Patrina Nuske Small in Australia began the project in 2005 with a set of crosses. Volunteer growers on both sides of the world crossed heirloom tomatoes with old dwarf varieties, then grew the seedlings on, year after year, until each new line bred true: full-flavoured tomatoes on short, sturdy plants. Every release is an Open Source Seed Initiative variety, free for anyone to grow, save and breed.
Craig closed the project at the end of 2023, with close to 160 varieties released.
This site
Dwarf Tomato Trellis draws the project as a vine, so you can follow any variety back to its heirloom parents, see the whole family tree, guess what a cross could give, and pick a dream plant to share. It is unofficial and not run by the project.
The data
The tree holds 55 crosses, 161 varieties, and 49 parents from outside the project.
Source
Every record comes from the Tomatofifou variety repertory, “Dwarf Tomato Project: Variety Repertory”, updated March 2023.
Fruit colour, fruit size, leaf type, season, and days to maturity come from the Dwarf Tomato Project website, as read in October 2025. It has a page for 128 of the 161 varieties. For the others, colour and shape come from one other source each (seed sellers and the Open Source Seed Initiative), linked from that variety’s page.
Colour, shape and leaf type for most of the parents from outside the project come from Tatiana’s TOMATObase, a growers’ wiki run by Tatiana Kouchnareva and its members, used under the GNU Free Documentation License. A few come from seed sellers (Tomatofifou, Victory Seeds). Each parent’s page links its source.
Open Tatiana’s TOMATObase · The licence
What the tree leaves out
- Every variety released after March 2023.
- Flavour and written descriptions. Each variety links to the project’s own page for those.
- A release year, where the source records none. Those varieties show as a hollow circle.
Where the source disagrees with itself
- Tidy. The source lists two parent pairs for this family. The tree uses the pair from the source summary table.
- Ivalde. The source lists Tanager under both Ivalde and Fancy. The tree leaves Tanager out.
- Sneaky. The source describes the project parent as a yellow off-type of Kangaroo Paw Red.
The records were copied by hand and have not been checked against a second source. Send us a correction