118 MANUAL OF TROPICAL AND SUBTROPICAL FRUITS 



the value of the tree is increased enormously. Perhaps no 

 other field in tropical horticulture offers such opportunities 

 for immediate results as this. 



THE MANGO FLOWER AND ITS POLLINATION 



The scanty productiveness of many Indian mangos has 

 been attributed by several writers to defective pollination. 

 A. C. Hartless, superintendent of the Government Botanical 

 Gardens at Saharanpur, India, discussed the matter at some 

 length in the Agricultural Journal of India, April, 1914. The 

 writer has personally investigated the subject in Florida, and 

 the results have been published in Bulletin 

 542 of the United States Department of 

 Agriculture. Burns and Prayag have 

 written on the structure and development 

 of the mango flower in the Agricultural 

 College Magazine, Poona, India, March, 



FIG. 13. A bisexual \g\l 



mango flower. (X 4) * . 



Ihe mango is polygamous and produces 



its flowers on terminal panicles varying in length from a few 

 inches up to two feet. Each panicle carries from 200 or 300 up 

 to more than 4000 flowers, of which only 2 or 3 per cent are 

 perfect in some varieties, or as many as 60 to 75 per cent 

 in others. The character of the panicle and the number of 

 flowers produced upon it differs according to the variety. 



The individual flower (Fig. 13) is subsessile, 6 to 8 milli- 

 meters in diameter when the corolla is outspread; the calyx 

 composed of five ovate-lanceolate, finely pubescent, concave 

 sepals ; and corolla of five elliptic-lanceolate to obovate-lance- 

 olate petals, 3 to 4 millimeters long, whitish, with three or four 

 fleshy orange ridges toward the base, and inserted at the base 

 of a fleshy, almost hemispherical disk, obscurely 5-lobed and 

 usually about 2 millimeters in diameter. In the perfect flower 



