By Evan Apt ’15
Summer intern at Fairchild Botanic Garden
This past weekend, Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden hosted the 22nd annual International Mango Festival in Miami, Florida. Over 8,000 guests attended this years festival, which featured the mangos of Columbia.
Over 500 varieties of mangos were present at the festival this year. This table displayed the mangos that were auctioned off.
“Over the two days of the festivities we will celebrate the mango as an object of beauty and admiration, a subsistence crop for the people and as a niche and mainstream commercial fruit of the future. Two full days of mango festivities will feature a wide range of products, ideas and of course the star of our show, the mango itself in all its glory. Mangos have been collected from the far reaches of the globe and nurtured in South Florida, following in the footsteps of David Fairchild, the most venerable mango collector of them all. Mangos in every culinary creation, work of art and on every flat surface. Visit the festival to shop Curator Choice mango trees and fresh fruit, enjoy mango lectures and smoothies, view the world’s largest display of mangos, take part in the world’s only mango auction and buy mango merchandise and botanical art.” (Adapted from Fairchildgarden.org)
A truck full of mangos that I helped pick in the days leading up to the Festival. We would fill the back of this pickup around 3 times a day for a week straight.
A view of the vendor market
Evan Apt is studying Environmental & Plant Biology at Ohio University and is currently interning at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables, FL.
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