Avocado's pink SE Asian cousin, Litsea garciae

[red durian]

You can pick these in the Bogor Botanical Garden in Java in December and January.  It has a mild flavour, not sweet,  lots of fat and nothing unpleasant about it.  Eaten locally with rice.   No species map at the gate, so you will have to search many acres to find it.

Does anyone know if this tree is available for sale in FL or HI?

[FlyingFoxFruits]

Red durio

Oscar has some fruiting for the first time this year, in Hawaii, and the fruits looked white not pink...if I'm not mistaken.

in FL I don't know of any nursey who stocks this rarity, bit Excalibur would be the one that has it if anyone.

I've thought of growing this, but I'd like to keep it small for container culture...to my understanding the tree would be hard to keep under 10 ft.   I'd love to try to grow a marcott!  and keep it small!

thanks for posting about this cool tree.   I wonder how it handles fusarium wilt?

[tabbydan]

If you check out the Bali Botanical Gardens they have tons of relatives.  I tried Litsea sp?  It was tasty but a bit too strong for eating out of hand by itself, probably good as a savory garnish.  Fatty with strong aromatic flavors.

[fruitlovers]

You can pick these in the Bogor Botanical Garden in Java in December and January.  It has a mild flavour, not sweet,  lots of fat and nothing unpleasant about it.  Eaten locally with rice.   No species map at the gate, so you will have to search many acres to find it.

Does anyone know if this tree is available for sale in FL or HI?

 Hi Red durian, Yes i have engkala here (Litsea garciae) and they fruited for first time this summer. I started a thread about it here: http://tropicalfruitforum.com/index.php?topic=995.0 where i posted photos of flowers, fruits starting to fruit and mature fruits. For some strange reason they all matured white exterior.

[red durian]

Beautiful photos of this beautiful fruit.  They are like Christmas Tree Ornaments.

[fruitlovers]

Beautiful photos of this beautiful fruit.  They are like Christmas Tree Ornaments.

It's a nice looking tree, pretty flowers, and the fruits are like little gems. Only difficult part is that fruits ripen very fast and all drop to the ground. Unlike avocado the trees don't hold the fruit for very long.

[red durian]

Sorry to duplicate your post in such an inferior way.  I will search before posting next time.

[fruitlovers]

Sorry to duplicate your post in such an inferior way.  I will search before posting next time.

No sweat. Always happy to read about engkala. This forum does have a good search frature and there are many thousands of posts in the archive so plenty of good info there.

[tabbydan]

I don't have a lot of experience with this fruit but I thought there were three possible final colorings (for the skin): purple, pink, white.

I made a special trip to Beidou in Taiwan (I was at Taipei at the time) to search for the fruit (I read online that it grew around a small temple there).  I found it growing around the temple but only the plants that seemed to be in the septic field were fruiting (they had purple fruits).

[murahilin]

Here is the link to Oscar's post about engkala: http://tropicalfruitforum.com/index.php?topic=995.0