The evergreen tree grows to heights of 25 meters. Its leaves are lanceolate to elliptic in shape, and range from 13 to 45 cm long and from 5 to 7 cm wide. The fruit are green in colour and mature to an orange/yellow, with the seed being pink. They grow to roughly 2 to 5 cm in diameter. The entire fruit, including its skin is edible. The fruit range from sweet to sour in flavor similar to the Alphonso mango, and have a light smell of turpentine. When ripe, the fruit is soft and has fibrous mango-like seeds. Flowering and fruiting times differ for Thailand and Indonesia.
Thailand : flowers in November to December, and fruit appears from April to May.
Indonesia : flowers in June to November, and fruit appears from March to June.
Both the leaves and fruit from the tree can be eaten. The leaves can be eaten raw when they are still young, and can be used in salads. While the seed is edible, the endosperm is generally bitter. The fruit is very acidic and has a mango-like flavour. It can be eaten raw, or made into dishes such as pickle, compote, or sambal. Unripened fruit can be used to make rojak and asinan.
Functional
The entire tree can be used as an ornamental fruit bearing shade tree due to its dense foliage.
Other names
Bouea macrophylla is commonly known in English as the "marian plum", "gandaria", "plum mango" and "mango plum". In Malay, the tree is known as kundang in Malay and its fruit buah kundang. The Malays differentiate between two varieties:
Kundang daun besar, also known as kundang hutan or setar. This usually refers to Bouea oppositifolia, and is the origin of the toponymAlor Setar.
In Indonesian, it is known as ramania and gandaria. It is also known in Thai as maprang and mayong. In Burmese as mayan-thi ; and in Vietnamese as thanh trà. In 2015 a major retailer introduced the fruit to the British public under the name plango, apparently a portmanteau word for "plum" and "mango". At the time the announcements noted the resemblance of the fruit to plums and mangoes, and some of the local press deliberately or naively announced that the fruit was a cross between a plum and a mango, which is not botanically plausible as plums and mangoes are not in the same family.
