The following fruit trees can thrive in wet locations (for the most part this assumes wet soil, and possibly brief periods where the trunk of the plant will be wet):
- Banana
- Camu Camu
- Guava
- Jaboticaba
- Miracle Fruit
- Mulberry
- Rollinia deliciosa
- Surinam Cherry
- Mango
I asked Peter Young from Birdwood about it and he said: “Mango roots have the ability to grow in anaerobic conditions. The most amazing thing I saw in the Everglades in Florida were mango orchards growing on flood plains and for four months of the year, the water comes up the stem and the trees are happy and they actually pick the fruit in boats. Around the water line, the mangoes have developed little pores through which the tree breathes and one of the researchers was trying to work this out so he took some Vaseline and put them over all the little holes and within 24 hours the tree died because it couldn’t breathe.”
Zig from the Northern Territory said: “Some mangoes here are flooded during the wet season and seem to do well. My place has a swamp running through it coming from my neighbour’s property on the other side of the road (east). He’s planted mangoes into the swamp and they spend a few months in flowing water. The swamp completely dries during the dry season. During mango fruiting there hasn’t usually been enough rain to even make the swamp waterlogged. Fruit picking is done from a dry ground surface. I’ve never noticed any significant difference between his seasonally flooded trees and the others on higher ground. I’ve a few mangoes in waterlogged ground on the edge of the swamp as well as a couple of cashews. It doesn’t seem to have disadvantaged them in any way. There are other areas of inundated mangoes here as well and there’s a belief among some that this stressing of the trees causes early flowering. There’s a few months gap between end of flooding and start of flowering. A lot of tropical trees in monsoonal climates are adapted to dealing with water logging for part of the year. Apparently high oxygen levels in rain water are sufficient for them during the flooding, and oxygen is drawn into the ground as water recedes during the dry season.”
Sheryl The interesting thing about this is that I have planted a whole hill of different Mangos with no irrigation at all. They get an initial bucket of water when planted and that has been all I have had to do so it looks as though they can withstand both wet and dry conditions.