The morning after Gilbert had raked its eye across Jamaica’s spine, blasting through decades of complacency and careless wishes to experience a real hurricane, I went to see how a nearby neighbour was doing. Part of his roof was sitting in our front yard and when I got to his house, I could see that all of the roof had been blown off during the storm. He was all right, he said. He and his sister, both of them quite elderly, had retreated to the only part of the house with a concrete slab roof and his family had called and were on their way to help.
But, he told me, I could expect the next mango season to be a bountiful one. The hurricane would have pruned branches, shaken up the roots and new life would be coursing through the trees that had survived.
And he was right. The massive old Bombay mango tree in our back yard has never borne fruit as abundantly as it did in the post- Gilbert season. Not in the thirty years since Sept 1988.
It was an old and venerable tree even then. Older and even more venerable now. It has had encounters with subsequent storms that have brushed past since. This year hasn’t been a very good season for the old Bombay tree, in fact. Relatively few in number, with a high incidence of worms in the ripe fruit.
The height of the hurricane season is still to come.
I don’t believe that there have to be storms for there to be good crops, not literally or figuratively. But my Bombay mango tree may be aligned with my old (long deceased) neighbour’s words.
July 1, 2018 at 5:53 pm
Nice photos and story. We have a mango tree in our yard too. It’s been very prolific, constantly dropping fruit much to the delight of the wild pigs. But this year, virtually nothing, and I have no idea why the change.
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July 1, 2018 at 6:51 pm
Thanks for commenting! How strange, the absence of fruit on your tree this year. All sorts of things affect trees, but it can be a puzzle sometimes to figure out what’s going on. When we first moved to this house thirty years ago, I planted my first poui trees, which bloomed once a year. Nowadays the trees bloom multiple times a year. Climate change? Changing rainfall patterns? I keep meaning to ask the experts…
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July 2, 2018 at 12:08 am
We had a particularly wet and grey winter, so I wondered if that was the reason. How nice that the poui trees are so prolific.
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