Kensington Pride Mango 1 kg

Organic

Producer: Andrea Palermo Botanical name: Mangifera indica L. ‘Kensington Pride’ 

MANGOES FROM SICILY? ABSOLUTELY.

Andrea Palermo grows his mangoes near Menfi on Sicily’s western coast, bathed inMediterranean sunshine. After studying viticulture and oenology in Friuli VeneziaGiulia, he returned home to apply that experience to the family farm.

Today Andrea, his father and two collaborators cultivate a diverse organic farmspanning 22 hectares producing grapes, citrus fruit, pomegranates, olives,avocados, mangoes and finger limes. They avoid chemical fertilisers, herbicides andsynthetic insecticides, using organic fertilisers and permitted natural treatmentsinstead.

Andrea began experimenting with mangoes almost a decade ago. After testingseveral varieties, he concentrated principally on Kensington Pride and Irwin;approximately 600 trees now occupy two hectares, cultivated with raised beds anddrip irrigation. 

ETYMOLOGY AND ORIGIN

The name Kensington refers neither to London nor to Kensington, Victoria, but to amango farm near Bowen in northern Queensland. In the late nineteenth century,sailors involved in the horse trade with India reportedly gave mango seeds to Bowenharbourmaster G. E. Sandrock. He planted and selected them at Woodlands beforepassing promising material to a Mr McDonald at Adelaide Point.

The selection then passed through William Lott and his son Henry Bankhead ‘Harry’Lott. At his Adelaide Point farm, aptly named Kensington, Harry isolated anexceptionally flavoursome, almost stringless mango and established a smallcommercial orchard. The fruit became known as Kensington, later Kensington Pride,as well as Bowen Mango and Bowen Special.

Harry reportedly guarded the variety carefully, yet its seeds eventually spreadthrough the Bowen and Burdekin districts. Its deeper ancestry remains uncertain,but several generations of Queensland selection created the variety we know today,and its name preserves the memory of Harry Lott’s Kensington farm.