I stood looking up at the branches of a massive tree in my grandmother’s backyard. My cousin has a long metal stick with a hooked end in her hands and was using it to pull down small, plump red fruits one by one. Holding one up to the light, I marveled at how lovely it looked, perfectly round, rosy and slightly translucent. I caught a whiff of its fragrant, sweet scent before popping it into my mouth…it was a sweet burst of flavor, unlike anything I’d eaten before! It tasted like a perfect bite of fruity cotton candy with a hint of caramel. I was, in a word, addicted. Every day we’d go out in the yard multiple times searching for the latest orbs that had ripened in the last few hours. If we were desperate, we’d pull down some that were still slightly green. This was my introduction to trung ca (meaning fish roe in Vietnamese), or Muntingia calabura. We’d just arrived in my mom’s hometown of Nha Trang, Vietnam in the summer of 1995. It was the beginning of my lifelong love for travel and fruit.
Muntingia calabura goes by many common names in English, such as strawberry tree, cotton candy berry, capulin, Jamaica cherry, Panama berry, ornamental cherry, jamfruit tree so for the sake of simplicity, I’ll simply refer to it as calabura for the rest of this post.
Origins
Calabura is native to Central America, the Caribbean, and tropical South America, but is now widely distributed throughout the tropical areas of the world like India, Southeast Asia, Pacific islands (Malaysia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines) Australia, New Zealand, East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania), and some islands in the Indian Ocean (Seychelles, Maldives, Sri Lanka, Christmas Island and Cocos Islands). In the US it can be found in south Florida and Hawaii, where it was introduced by the US Department of Agriculture in 1922. It’s such an easy and fast-growing tree, with seeds easily dispersed by birds and bats, that it’s now considered invasive in some countries such as Puerto Rico, Singapore, and Papua New Guinea.
A great tree for your tropical garden
If you live in a tropical climate, a calabura tree would be great for your garden. It’s a fast-growing tree (up to 13' in two years) and can start producing fruit after only 18–24 months. It’s self-fruiting so you don’t need more than one tree to get fruit. In most areas where it grows, it fruits year-round and in the areas which have a cold spell, fruiting is interrupted for about four months. The best part is the trees thrive without any coddling or care, are drought-tolerant, and do well in poor soils. Mature trees can be 25–40' high and as wide so they can provide ample shade.
Other benefits of having this tree are the cute white flowers which only last a day but which will attract bees to your garden. The fruits take only 6–8 weeks to ripen and are, of course, a delight to eat. And as they ripen individually instead of all at once, you can enjoy them in small quantities year-round, instead of the glut and scarcity of most fruits. The fruit are high in vitamin C and antioxidants and have been shown to possess strong anti-inflammatory properties.
The only relative downside is that the estimated lifespan of the trees is 30 years. However, the tree is fully non-toxic and the wood at the end of its life cycle can be used for a variety of other things.
Uses
Calabura trees seem to be grown mostly for shade and there isn’t any commercial production of the fruit. The fruit is sometimes sold in Mexican markets. I didn’t see any being sold in Vietnam even though the trees were plentiful. In Brazil, they are considered too small to be of commercial value but it is recommended that the tree be planted on river banks so that the abundance of flowers and fruits falling into the water will serve as bait, attracting fish for the benefit of fishermen.
According to Purdue Univerity’s horticultural site, other uses include:
Wood: The sapwood is yellowish, the heartwood reddish-brown, firm, compact, fine-grained, moderately strong, light in weight, durable indoors, easily worked, and useful for interior sheathing, small boxes, casks, and general carpentry. It is valued mostly as fuel, for it ignites quickly, burns with intense heat and gives off very little smoke. Jamaicans seek out trees blown down by storms, let them dry for a while and then cut them up, preferring this to any other wood for cooking. It is being evaluated in Brazil as a source of paper pulp.
Bark: The bark is commonly used for lashing together the supports of rural houses. It yields a very strong, soft fiber for twine and large ropes.
Medicinal Uses: The flowers are said to possess antiseptic properties. An infusion of the flowers is valued as an antispasmodic. It is taken to relieve headache and the first symptoms of a cold.
As always, if you happen across this fruit in your travels, do give it a try! I’m sure you will love it (nearly😜) as much as I do!
Fruitfully yours,
Yen
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