White flamboyant to shade Vietnam

A company in HCM City has sent its experts to Da Lat to study the only white flamboyant tree in Vietnam and to multiply it.
The owner of this special tree, Dr. Ha Ngoc Mai has agreed to try to multiply the tree. Many senior gardeners in Da Lat supported this idea, saying the most suitable time is when the white flamboyant’s flowers wither.
“Today science allows us to use invitro or grafting methods. Grafting is simpler. Da Lat’s gardeners are experts at tree-grafting, so it won’t be difficult to multiply the white flamboyant tree,” explained Dr. Mai.
The single tree has yielded only several fruits over the last 12 years, so it has been unable to multiply naturally.
Dr. Mai brought this tree to Vietnam in 1998 from Sydney, Australia. At that time, an Asian worker at a nursery in Sydney introduced Mai to a violet flamboyant grafted with a mutated white flamboyant tree. The price for this violet-white tree was $25.
“Returning to Vietnam, I brought this tree to Da Lat to grow, but I was not sure whether it would blossom with white flowers,” Dr. Mai recalled.
Three years later, the tree began blossoming bunches of white flowers.
“At that time I believed that the tree I bought was a white flamboyant tree because the mutation process is unpredictable. The mutation can happen to the entire tree or only several branches,” she added.
The first bunches of white flamboyant yielded several fruits and Dr. Mai cultivated over 50 seedlings from these fruits. However, they produced violet flowers, not white.