The African mangosteen easily earns a place in any warm, subtropical garden. The form of the tree resembles a piece of angular modern sculpture, and the leaves and young branches are an almost unique shade of deep blue-green. The fruits are memorably delightful, and no doubt will cause intense competition between gardeners, neighbours birds and monkeys-indeed, anyone who knows good eating!

These trees grow slowly, and so remain manageable in small gardens for a long time. They do better on deep, sandy soils, such as the semi-fossil beach dune on which most of Maputo is built, but will grow (after a fashion) elsewhere. In my own garden, I planted one about two years ago close to a sandstone outcrop. The tree is growing, but seems set to become an inadvertent bonsai. Maybe bonsai enthusiasts could experiment with African mangosteens, though I doubt whether they would grow into any recognized style.

The fact that African mangosteens appear regularly on the Botanical Society plant sale in Durban indicates that they are available as small trees from nurseries, at least in this area. Although it may be harder and possibly less legal to find seeds than nursery-grown plants, Pooley (1993) tells us that these trees can easily be grown from seed. Not surprisingly, they are known to be sensitive to cold.

Almost any tree can be given a good start if you plant it the way the late Denzil Carr of the Tree Society taught me. The hole needs to be at least a metre cube (two metres long is better, he said). Put a layer of broken bricks, the cheapest and nastiest stock bricks you can find (rubble from a demolished wall is often ideal) in the bottom, and a pipe (a used gutter or down-pipe) in one corner. Put a rich mixture of topsoil, compost and a little fertilizer on top of the bricks, and back-fill the hole so that the poorest soil is on top. Now put the hose down the pipe and water the hole until the top of the soil is saturated. By doing this, you will have filled the bricks and the good soil with water, which they will release slowly. When the top subsides, an hour or so after this soaking, you can plant your tree, and make good the subsidence in the hole with more subsoil or any other mulch. Water the tree thoroughly from below via the pipe once a week. This will cause the roots to grow downwards, so that the soil acts as a mulch. Despite appearances, this actually saves water, as well as encouraging the tree to grow faster than it would otherwise.

Once it is established, the African mangosteen will need almost no maintenance. I do not recall ever seeing a diseased one, and certainly mine is not attacked by the legions of caterpillars and other herbivores in my garden. At the time I took the picture of the fruit attached to this page, at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo, the only pest attacking the fruit was myself. However, any garden centre should be able to advise on prevention if there is an outbreak of insect pests.