Mango/Mangosteen Tapestry

This nature collage on a black lava rock background resembles a beautiful shawl I found at a night market in Bangladesh. It was embroidered in vines and fruits on black cotton. Here I arranged glow bush vines with rosy buds and large purple blossoms and blue ginger blossoms around a ripe mango and some whole and cut-open mangosteens to reveal the white flesh with a whole and split-open pitch apple from the Autograph tree. Mangoes or in botanical terms Mangifera indica are native to India where they have been cultivated for over 4,000 years and are known as the King of Fruit. The name mango comes from the Portuguese word manga which was adapted from the Tamil word man-kay meaning “mango tree fruit.”

When Portuguese spice traders introduced the fruit to Europe they called it manga and the British adapted it to mango. In Singapore one always eats mangos followed by a few sweet-tart, creamy peachy mangosteens so I combined two of my favorite fruits with pitch apples and flowering vines from my backyard in Hawaii. Mangosteen is from the Malay word manggis. Dutch explorers adapted this term to mango and added the suffix “osteen” describing a foreign plant found in the jungle. The deep purple pincushion-shaped fruit is not related to the mango but tastes delightful after devouring a sweet mango.