Craving to Create the Perfect Berry

Those are ready to market.

Still, he wasn't satisfied to have solved that problem. Instead, he wanted a new quest.

His job involves walking miles of rows of plants, sampling the fruit. Some are too acid. Some too soft. Some taste like a sweaty sock.

He flags the good ones with tape, entering data about them into a computerized database to guide breeding efforts.

One day, while slogging through a field of 12,000 plants in Spain, still recovering from a bottle of wine the night before, mind numb at the end of the day, he stopped. He did a double take: He was looking at the perfect plant. All the berries were ripe at the same time, and it had single leaves rather than clusters.

He ran and got his camera, carefully dug up the plant with a little spade, cleaned off its soil, bagged it, put it on ice and babied it all the way to England.

He and Coleman are now trying to create a sort of superberry.

Swartz's company, Five Aces Breeding, is the privatized version of the university's small fruit program. Based in Laurel, but moving to Garrett County, in western Maryland, soon, it is affiliated with strawberry and raspberry farms on three continents. "You can't make five aces without a wild card," he said. "We use wild species -- that's our wild card."