The ‘Will and Kate’ Mango tree is one year old

It is one year since the marriage of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and reports say that the Royal couple plan to spend it at an undisclosed location in the United Kingdom.  After their marriage on April 29 last year, the royal couple honeymooned in the Seychelles, before touring Canada and California last summer then returning home to the UK to settle down to married life.

William has recently returned from a six-week deployment in the Falkland Islands as an RAF search and rescue helicopter co-pilot, while Kate has carried out a string of solo engagements around the country and are set to enjoy their first marriage anniversary.

So you might ask what the Royal anniversary has anything to do with someone living almost 11,000 km away?  As alluded to earlier, I had a momentary lapse  of eco-friendliness on the day of the Royal wedding.

Sometime in April last year, a neighbour found herself with a quality Mango plant.  Since her apartment doesn’t have a suitable space to grow the tree - actually that apartment is fully paved;  there is no unpaved area for even a tuft of grass - she asked whether I’d be interested it taking it over.

Thus a cute little Mango cultivar landed in the earthen space behind my apartment complex.  For a week or so it continued to languish in its black plastic grow bag.  On 29th of April 2011, I finally scrounged up the energy to plant the Mango sapling.

Ever since, I’ve started to refer to the plant as the ‘Will and Kate’ tree.  Now the ‘plant’ is ‘one’ year old and has grown into a strapping 5 footer, though it is still a little fragile.  Here is a picture of the ‘Will and Kate’ tree, snapped today morning around 11 a.m.



To prevent anyone silly enough to pluck a few leaves off it, I’ve placed a triangular tree protector, which seems to be doing its job.  The 5 foot length of 2” PVC is the ‘support’ for the fragile sapling, without which it is sure to snap off with wind shear or in heavy rains.

Now there are several reasons for me to have named it the ‘Will and Kate’ Mango tree:

• the Mango is considered to be the King of Fruits - even the NYT seems to have grudgingly come around to that view [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/25/health/nutrition/25recipehealth.html];
• the obvious reason - having been planted on the day, almost to the moment, when Kate married Will;
• the plant is a ‘graft’ - like 2 people joined in marriage, 2 different plants have been ‘married’ in my plant;
• someone else planted a mango ‘seed’ later in the year, and that plant to the rear of this one hasn’t grown tall, but is sort of plump.  Isn’t a Younger, plumper, rear spelled Pippa now?
• of late the plant seems to have attracted a frog and subjected it (pun intended) to its charms;
• though I am waiting for a pretty girl to come by and confirm whether that frog is in reality a prince or not.

B-)

Here is the waiting frog prince -



My Naughty half natters, ‘Now, didn’t I call it right, by naming the plant ‘Will and Kate’ tree?’

---