Did you know that more mangoes are sold on earth than any other fruit? Or that Mango trees have been cultivated and grafted for hundreds of years. Grafting was a 'secret' in many cultures and tasty mangoes were status symbols for the royalty only. Ancient kings would steal limbs off each others' mango trees and bribe and kidnap the other kings' gardeners. Peasants were punished for possession of mango fruit or unauthorized cultivation of mango fruit trees. Royalty would try to surpass each other with lavish mango parties and huge gifts of perfect, ripe, delicious mango fruits. Some of today's Indochinese awesome varieties existed many, many years ago exactly as we have them now.
Mango trees are evergreens.
The civilized grafted mango trees we have now are nothing like the ancient, wild trees whose small fruit tasted like turpentine and had the texture of nylon yarn. The old test of a mango fruit was it's stringiness, it's fiber content. You used to judge a mango by how much dental floss it had. The advent of the free exchange of scientific and agricultural data changed all that. Grafting began to be widely practiced.
Mango fruit from seeds is never the same as the mother tree's fruit. So the seed out of a great tasting fruit will likely produce a tree yielding horrible tasting fibrous fruit. The only certain way to be sure you'll have tasty fruit is to propagate (by grafting, and in some cases cloning) an existing particular, individual tree (DNA-wise) whose quality is proven.
The odds of a seed producing worthwhile fruit are very, very small. Like one in a hundred million.
Mango leaves contains urushiol, the chemical in poison ivy and poison sumac that can cause urushiol-induced contact dermatitis in susceptible people. Cross-reactions between mango contact allergens and urushiol have been observed. Those with a history of poison ivy or poison oak may be most at risk for such an allergic reaction. Urushiol is also present in mango vines and to a lesser degree in the peel . During mango's primary season, it is the most common source of plant dermatitis in Hawaii
These and other mango facts can be found here
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