Ancestor Lychee Tree of Thanh Ha

This lychee tree has children, and it has grandchildren too.

Standing beside it is a younger lychee tree, its child, and then another, its grandchild. Both of them are old trees by now. The people of Thúy Lâm village call the parent of them both the ancestor lychee tree.

The ancestor tree stands in a family garden in the village of Thúy Lâm, in the countryside of Thanh Hà, which now belongs to the city of Hải Phòng. The bark on its trunk is rough and knotted. From the trunk, a great many branches spread out in every direction and weave together into a wide dome of leaves. That dome shades a whole corner of the garden, like a huge umbrella left open under the sky. Every year, when the season comes, the tree still bears fruit.

As for the age of this green umbrella, everyone counts it a different way. Some say the tree is nearly 200 years old. Others count from the life of the man who planted the seed, and they arrive at a smaller number. Either way, the tree has lived for more than a hundred years. In 1992, the national body of the Vietnam Gardening Association identified the ancestor tree as the oldest lychee tree in the whole country.

More than a hundred years ago, there lived in the village a man named Hoàng Văn Cơm. He was a fruit trader, born in 1848 right here on the land of Thúy Lâm. His trade took him from place to place, and some of his trips went all the way to Hải Phòng.

The story goes that once, in Hải Phòng, Mister Cơm was a guest at a feast given by an ethnic Chinese family. Some say it was a wedding feast. At that meal he tasted a kind of lychee far sweeter and more fragrant than any lychee he had known. When he finished, he did not throw the seeds away. He kept three of them, carried them home to Thúy Lâm, and planted them in the soil of his family garden. People believe this variety first came from Thiều Châu, in China. That, they say, is how it got its name, vải thiều.

The village tale continues that all three seeds sprouted. Three tender green shoots pushed up out of the ground. But in the end, only one tree lived. The other two shoots never grew up. People say that back then, the family did not yet know how precious this lychee was, so they did not tend the young plants with much care.

The one surviving tree simply kept on growing. It stretched out its branches and put out its leaves, year after year. Then one season, the first clusters of fruit hung swaying from its branches.

Once the lychee tree in the garden had grown big, the family of Mister Cơm did not keep the fine variety to themselves. They planted more of its seeds, and they also raised new trees from the tree's own branches, so that other households in the village could have trees to plant.

The grown-ups of the family would pick a branch on the tree. They packed a ball of earth around it and bound it tight. The branch stayed on the tree, still fed by the tree. Meanwhile, inside the ball of earth, young roots quietly began to sprout. Only when the roots had grown did the grown-ups cut the branch free and take it away to plant. That is how, from one lychee branch, a new lychee tree began its life in another garden.

In this way, the lychee from the garden of Mister Cơm traveled to one garden after another across the village. The people of Thanh Hà regard the ancestor tree as the cradle of the vải thiều lychee grown in Vietnam.

In 1958, people from Thúy Lâm even carried vải thiều lychees all the way to the Presidential Palace as a gift for President Hồ Chí Minh. He praised them as a fine variety and asked the villagers to plant more.

Seen from high above, three large rivers wind around the land of Thanh Hà. One is the Thái Bình. The other two are the Rạng and the Văn Úc. Inside that ring, small rivers and creeks slip between the villages and the gardens. One of those small rivers is named the Hương. The Hương links village to village and garden to garden. It brings water to the gardens, and it is also a road for passing boats.

The vải thiều trees grow along the Hương, on rich alluvial soil. In the old days, before there were dikes, floodwater spilled over the fields and gardens every rainy season. When the water drew back, it left a fresh layer of silt on the land. And among those strips of land, in the village of Thúy Lâm, the ancestor tree still spreads its green umbrella.

When spring comes, the tips of the lychee branches burst into clusters of tiny, pale yellow flowers. The growers are glad to see them, because flowers like these are the sign of a good harvest.

When the lychee flowers open, the bees arrive. In Thanh Hà, people keep bees to gather honey from the lychee blossoms. Lychee blossom honey is pale yellow, almost the color of the flower clusters, and it carries a faint scent of the flowers.

Then the flowers fade, and small young fruit begin to set on the branches. In early summer, around May and June, the lychees ripen. That is when, in gardens all along the rivers, the grown-ups begin to pick the fruit. From a distance, all you can see are clusters of pinkish purple fruit peeking out from the green leaves, and the shapes of people picking them one cluster at a time.

The skin of the vải thiều has a color that people compare to pink silk with a purple sheen. The grown-ups peel the skin away, and inside lies the flesh, white and clear as glass. The flesh is thick, sweet and fragrant. The seed sits in the middle, tiny. A seed that small, and yet, as the village tells it, the ancestor tree began from a seed just like it.

In that same season, visitors from far away come looking for Thúy Lâm village. They want to stand in the shade of the tree that grew out of the story of the three lychee seeds. Some groups even ride in small boats along the rivers of the region, watching the lychee gardens on both banks. The family of Mister Cơm is still there, looking after the tree.

The lychee season passes, and the last clusters of fruit leave the branches. All through autumn, and all through winter, the lychee trees keep their round green crowns, and so does the ancestor tree.

Of the three lychee seeds long ago, as the village tells it, only one became a tree. And today, beside that tree, there still stands a child lychee tree and a grandchild lychee tree. It has children, and it has grandchildren.