Hoa Loc Mango

Plant the seed of a sweet mango, and it may not grow into a tree that bears sweet fruit. However sweet the mango, its seed can promise nothing in advance.

In Hòa Hưng, people still pass along a story about a few mango seeds and a farmhand named Nguyễn Văn Lời.

The land there lies on the north bank of the Tiền River, near the Mỹ Thuận Bridge. The Tiền River is one of the two branches of the Mekong that flow through Vietnam. At the start of the 20th century, this was the village of Hòa Lộc. It belonged to the district of Cái Bè, in the province of Mỹ Tho. Later, the village merged with two other villages, Mỹ Hưng and Mỹ Thuận. Together they became the commune of Hòa Hưng. Today, the Cái Bè area belongs to Đồng Tháp province. But the old village name lives on in the name of a fruit, xoài cát Hòa Lộc, the Hòa Lộc mango.

In the old days, the villages along this river kept a custom. Whenever a fruit was especially good, or especially rare, people usually carried it first to the communal house as an offering. Only after the offering was the fruit shared among those who ran the affairs of the village.

Lời did not farm land of his own. He labored in the fields and orchards of a landowner. In those days, a man who worked that way was called a tenant farmer.

One day, as some tell it, the landowner brought home a few mangoes. Their skin was paper thin. The flesh was smooth and deeply sweet. Lời loved that mango so much that he asked for a few, so he could take the seeds and plant them.

There is another version, which Nguyễn Văn Khoa heard from his own father. Khoa once served as head of Hòa Hưng commune. According to his father, the first man to taste that mango was a councilor named Chí. He lived in Mỹ Hưng, the village right next to Hòa Lộc. After a ceremony at the communal house, the councilor took the mangoes home. Then he asked Lời to plant the seeds.

Lời worked for the councilor, the father went on, and was allowed to build a house on a plot of land in the orchard. On that plot he raised four mango trees from seed, one of them right in front of the house. The trees kept growing, and in time they bore fruit.

Later, in that telling, Lời went back to Hòa Lộc. He took with him seeds from the good fruit of those trees and planted them in the soil of his village. The young trees grew well. The father said the fame of the Hòa Lộc mango began from there.

The father also said that just as the first trees planted by Lời began to bear, the French authorities of that time held a contest to choose the finest fruit. In 1902, in that story, the mangoes from the household of Lời won a prize as a fine fruit.

Another year is also remembered in the area, 1930. That year, a tenant farmer in Hòa Lộc brought this mango home and planted it in his own garden. The tree gave plenty of fruit, both fragrant and sweet. Then in the 1940s, as people tell it, the mango won high prizes at the fruit contests of the day.

From then on, as the villagers still tell it, xoài cát Hòa Lộc became the offering they made to the spirit of the Hòa Lộc communal house.

Every year, the Tiền River lays fresh silt over this land. The weather here falls into two clear seasons, one rainy and one dry. The dry season arrives just as the mangoes are building up their sugar. So the ripe fruit has a clean, light sweetness.

On the trees, growers wrap each fruit in a bag. It keeps the thin skin looking fine and cuts down on pests and disease.

The fruit is slender and long. It is round at the stem end and pointed at the tip, with a gently curved belly. While the fruit is young, the skin is green. As it ripens, the very thin skin turns a bright yellow, with a fine white powder across the surface.

Inside, the flesh is firm, thick and smooth. It has little fiber and is not very juicy. The taste is sweet but gentle.

The scientist Nguyễn Minh Châu was once head of the Southern Horticultural Research Institute. He said that if he could choose the most beautiful fruit, the one that catches the eye most, he would choose xoài cát Hòa Lộc. In his view, a fruit weighing about 450 grams is the ideal size.

Since 2009, the name xoài cát Hòa Lộc has been reserved for mangoes grown in the protected area of Cái Bè.

In 2019, a few journalists came looking for the orchard of Khoa. He showed them two mango trees. Around 1930, he told them, a younger brother of Lời, the one the family called the tenth, married his aunt Ba. Among the wedding gifts from the family of the groom was a tray of mangoes. The seeds from that tray were planted in the garden of his own family. The two trees in front of them had grown from that planting.

By then, both trees were more than 70 years old, and they were considered the oldest Hòa Lộc mango trees. Each trunk was as thick as a pair of arms could hug. The bark was about three adult finger joints thick. At that time, the two trees stood about 20 paces from the edge of the Tiền River. The season before, each tree still gave about 100 kilograms of mangoes. That was more than trees only three or four decades old would give.

That day, Khoa also said this mango can be told apart while the tree is still young, just putting out its first leaves. The tip of the leaf is slender and pointed, leaning a little to one side, and wavy. The veins stand out thicker than those of any other mango variety.

About the mango seed, Châu had something more to say. In his view, many fruit trees, mangoes among them, often give seeds that have already crossed with other trees on their own. As he put it, a tree grown from seed has no idea which tree is its father.

These days, to get young trees, people usually graft. Grafting mangoes is work for practiced gardeners. The gardener raises a mango seed into a seedling, which serves as the rootstock. From a branch of a carefully chosen tree, the gardener takes a tiny bud, called a graft bud, and sets it on the stem of the rootstock. In time, the branches and leaves grow from that very bud.

Gardeners call the trees chosen to give these buds mother trees. In 2024, the agriculture authorities of what was then Tiền Giang province recognized an orchard in Hòa Hưng as a mother orchard. It held 50 Hòa Lộc mango trees.

Graft buds from that orchard are set aside for the nurseries licensed to raise young trees.

In those nurseries, on young mango trees that have not yet borne a single fruit, the leaves already speak the name Hòa Lộc.