No tomato with that title appears in Tatiana's TOMATObase (nearly 5,000 open-pollinated varieties).

No tomato with that title appears in the Ventmarin database (nearly 15,000 varieties).

Thanks, I had checked Tatiana's, and saved the French database for future reference. I was rather surprised that no one had named a tomato (or a dozen) by a name like Southern Belle! I was hoping someone here might have had it handed down through family.

The descriptions on Isaac's site is BS.

"Rare Heirloom grown in Savannah since the 1700's
The story: This rich red
heirloom was grown in a Savannah garden after the lady of the mansion was
believed
to have had a brief affair with an Italian lover...........a
man who was an importer of Italian vegetable seeds!
VERY
LIMITED QUANTITY AVAILABLE FOR THIS YEAR"

In the late 1700's Thomas Jefferson had an affair with a dual national Englishwoman from Tuscany, who continued correspondence with him and exchanged some seeds. In those days there were no "seed importers" from Italy except some of the forward thinking wealthy and political elite like Jefferson, and a few farmers that brought their personal heirlooms with them. If you read what it was like to try to ship seeds at that time, you will see the difficulty. There were no hybrid seeds to sell and until the mid 1850s, everyone pretty much grew the same few tomatoes, and that was not one of them. The story is manufactured. It looks like a Costoluto tomato on that website, and also the shape is of Purple Calabash which has been associated with Jefferson, for whatever wishful claim. It sounds suspicious that someone decided to manufacture this tomato from those type of seeds so they could offer an heirloom. Isaacs might well be Costoluto Fiorentino seeds, which look just like the Isaac's picture, not to mention Jefferson's girlfriend was born in Florence.

Did you actually get the bicolor or is that the descripion you got about the traded seeds?

PC

My frriend grew a yellow/orange bicolor which I think she traded for with the man in this video. Youtube tomato video. It looks nothing like the picture on Isaacs, which someone told me was a generic picture because they didn't have one.

.

The man in the video ordered from Isaacs and thinks it is their Southern Belle tomato (which is a manufactured heirloom story attempted by those folks).

This is an attempt to manufacture nonsense heirloom stories by Isaacs combined with the fact that the guy who probably gave her the seeds is not being 100% sure he hasn't mixed up his seeds, but showing the bicolor in the video, which looks a lot like most bicolors, similar to the popular beautiful heirloom Ruby Gold which being the most common may actually be that variety.

Back to the fake stories from Isaacs and heirlooms. Their original site is Seeds for Thee. Go to that site if you want to cringe more. There you will find the seeds packets are from "The Rincon Plant Preservation and Introduction Garden", which is nothing anyone has ever heard of except sounds too much like a knock off marketing name someone got the idea from the Sandhill Preservation Center. Anyway, sounds like these Georgia belles and beaux at Isaac's suffer from a need to manufacture very tall tales and I would question their deceitfulness if they pulled a picture out of the blue from Costoluto Fiorentino and used it for their 1700's heirloom. (Bicolors, anyways are from German selection in the 1800's), not much known from the sovereign States that later became the country of Italy.

On their seeds for thee site we find more BS in the Red Babylonian heirloom tomato (deceptively as if there were tomatoes in the Babylonian Gardens of millenia past). Then we continue onward in more manufactured goat manure on the original site, now it looks like someone really did get the idea from the Thomas Jefferson story as I guessed earlier, as they seem to be fans of him and tomatoes...another heirloom story of their manufacture includes this dig at Virginia and Jefferson, showing these people are big time into making this crap up, because Saul's Grandmama told him about Brer rabbit:

Excerpt:

"Saul: "Grandmama
said Thomas Jefferson
grew Blackeye peas on his farm in Virginia.
'Brer
Rabbit Pinkeye'is Eatonton, Georgia's own
favorite pea- similar to Blackeye,
but has a
brownish eye, so why come it is called Pinkeye
I can't say,
but the important part to know is Pinkeyes
tastes whole lots better than
Blackeye. No insult meant
to the folks in Virginia. Also Brer Rabbit
Pinkeyes have
a purple hull. Fancy! I think you will enjoy these
peas.""

PC

My 'southern belle' tomatoes are producing now, and they are red in color.