The mango is the king of summer in Miami

Those who sweat and suffer in South Florida in June and July are rewarded with blushing mangoes from trees in gardens, streets and malls.

WHY WE ARE HERE

We explore how America defines itself place by place. In South Florida, mango lovers turn to fruit to build a sense of community during the grueling summer.

The air becomes thick with humidity as summer arrives in South Florida. The evening thunders. The tropics are starting to stir.

Then something magical happens: the mango trees bear fruit. In good years, they produce so much that strangers give away mangoes on their lawns. Neighbors pack them in boxes to send to loved ones. Friends offer homemade pies.

This has been a very good year.

In the month of June, Zak Stern, the founder of Zak the Baker, his bakery in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood, invited customers to take six local mangoes in exchange for a loaf of bread. He started taking about 200 a day.

“I think we have enough mango jam for the next five years,” he said.

Summer in Miami scares off tourists and part-timers who just want to enjoy the glorious winter. The roads are getting emptier. The days are getting slower.

The reward for hardy locals who keep sweating and suffering through hurricane season year-round comes in the form of the enticing mango, blushing from trees in gardens, streets and malls.

“This,” said Mr. Stern, who grew up in suburban Kendall, “is a gift to the people who stay.”

What he and other South Florida mango evangelists cherish most about the June-August peak season is how sharing a beloved fruit brings people together in a relatively young, multinational city with few commonly shared traditions. Mangoes remind immigrants of the places they left – and make them feel that Miami, with its mix of cultures and languages, is their home.

“People who are originally from tropical countries — Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, or Latin America, for example — grow up eating mangoes,” said Jonathan H. Crane, a tropical fruit crop specialist at the University of Florida for Tropical Research and Education. center in Homestead, south of Miami. “So there’s a connection to childhood mangoes.”

I grew up with mangoes in Venezuela, but didn’t fully appreciate their juiciness until I moved to Miami two decades ago. With no garden of my own, I scour the suburbs for fruit for sale, saving some for my mother’s mango ceviche. A friend hosts an annual mango daiquiri party that has become one of my favorite ways to celebrate the start of summer. Inevitably it rains.

Almost everyone has mango stories. Mr. Stern likes to eat them over the sink, the juice dripping down his chin. Xavier Murphy, who is from Jamaica, has gone to such lengths to protect his East Indian mango tree from hungry wildlife that he spent a year using the life-sized cutout of a Jonas brother of his children as a scarecrow. (It worked for a while.) Born in Cuba and raised in Mexico, Natalia Martinez-Kalinina bakes mango pies in honor of her grandmother, who gave away bucketfuls of mangoes every summer in Cuba.

“It’s become a very nice common exchange,” Ms. Martinez-Kalinina said. “People text me and say, ‘I’ve got mangoes – do you need more for mango pie?'”

Mangoes originated in Southeast Asia and were spread around the world by settlers—including to South Florida in the mid-1800s, where wealthy landowners grew them as a potentially profitable crop. But workers from the Bahamas and Cuba also brought seeds because the fruit reminded them of home, says Timothy P. Watson, an English professor at the University of Miami who is working on a book on the history of Florida mangoes.

“They literally mix here in Miami,” he said of the varieties from around the world. “The combination produces mango farming, which is now one of the few things that brings people together in this incredibly fractured metropolitan area. It’s a complicated story and a bitter one in many ways.”

Florida mangoes dominated the commercial market in the United States until Hurricane Andrew destroyed nearly half of the state’s forests in 1992. International trade agreements then made it cheaper to import mangoes once grown in Florida from Latin America and the Caribbean. According to dr. Crane, there may still be 1,500 acres left in Florida’s mango industry.

Cold weather hurt the harvest last year, but a more typical winter and spring led to a bountiful harvest this year, with no biting temperatures to threaten the fruit or flowers that preceded it.

Although commercial activities have largely withered away, mangoes still thrive in backyards and the small specialty market, said Dr. Crane, because mangophiles demand varieties not found in supermarkets.

“I like anything but boredom,” says Walter Zill, 81, who sells mangoes of the 40 or so varieties he grows with his wife Verna in the Palm Beach County town of Boynton Beach. “A person can eat a lot of mangoes and never get tired of them.”

His brother, Gary Zill, grows some 90 varieties for sale in nearby Lake Worth, including nearly two dozen of his own cultivars with names like Coconut Cream and Pineapple Pleasure. In the 1960s, his father’s nursery sold only 16 varieties.

In the upscale Miami suburb of Coral Gables, the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden has 550 varieties of mango, one of the most diverse collections in the world. Bruce W. Greer, the chairman of the board of trustees, helped create an annual mango festival. Now in its 30th year, it is expected to attract as many as 8,000 visitors this weekend.

A few months ago, Mr. Greer’s sister came to town and wanted to take her daughter to the house where she and Mr. Greer lived as children. The two mango trees their father had planted in the early 1960s – a Haden and a Kent – were still there and thriving.

“I literally remember my dad putting them in when I was 6 years old,” said Mr. Greer, who has 22 trees of his own. “They went through I don’t know how many owners. They have continued throughout my life.”

That inspired Mr. Greer to come up with a new “Million Mango Project” for Fairchild to promote tree planting throughout Miami, with the goal of bringing people closer to the prized fruit and shade in limited-canopy neighborhoods.

“We’re going to reintroduce these mangoes into the landscape,” he said.

Two years ago, shortly after moving into a historic home in Coral Gables, Catalina Saldarriaga was inundated with fruit from two large mango trees on her property that she believes must be at least 60 years old. This year she will be collecting 70 to 80 mangoes a day again.

“It may be my favorite fruit,” says Mrs. Saldarriaga, 64, who grew up in Colombia with much smaller mangoes. “But you can only eat one or two a day.”

She gives the rest to friends, family, her cleaning lady, the contractors who repair her pergola. The mangoes that fall to the ground, uneaten by iguanas, birds, or squirrels, she leaves on a lawn near her driveway for passersby to take for free.

A man stopped on his bicycle to thank her. Someone left flowers.

“What a joy,” she said, “that someone else can enjoy it too.”

Kitty Bennett contributed research.