Abricotier
Mammee Mammea americana
This indigineous West Indian fruit tree with its conical form and dense green foliage stands out from the other flora. It is especially abundant on the Rochelois Plateau, in the Port-Salut area, and in the district of it's namesake, ---Les Abricots---, and widely distributed in regions below 1,000 meters (3,280 feet). In Taíno mythology, it played an interesting role as the ambrosia of a Western Heaven, a terrestrial paradise which was supposed to exist on the tip of the Southwest Peninsula (Guayacarina). Moreau de Saint-Mèry wrote that they were abundant in the woods in the region of Jérémie; and that they were favored sites for her hunting wild hogs which assembled beneath them to eat the fallen fruits. At present, there is a grove of huge apricots near the mouth of the Rivière des Abricots. Outside the village of Les Abricots there is an immense cemetery to which corpses are brought from a distance for burial, and where a great fair, which attracts people from as far far away as Les Cayes, is held on All Saints Day. Whether there is a relationship between these customs and the legend of a people who vanished four and a half centuries ago would form an interesting topic for investigation.
As the mammees are often self-sown or grown from carelessly selected seed the fruits from many of the trees have thin pithy flesh. They are seldom taken to market or even gathered for food; rather, they are allowed to fall and are used to fatten hogs. The fruit from a good tree is delicious raw, and it can be made into a confiture (preserve) that in color and flavor bears a strong resemblance to apricot jam. In the Dominican Republic and Cuba the aboriginal term 'mamey' is applied to the fruit.
From the hard, tough, durable wood of large logs of mammee, the Haitians fashion canots (long canoe-shaped troughs for storing cane juice at boiling houses), gamelles (bateas), and pilons (mortars). The bark is boiled to make an infusion that is sprinkled on the floors of houses to kill fleas.
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