Durio Mansoni

There’s not a lot of information about Durio mansoni. I was about to give up on this durian as the most boring fruit ever. But then this phrase caught my eye, “Big, succulent arils.”

That’s right, we’re talking about something delicious. My interest was piqued once again.

“Big, succulent arils,” was how it was described in its very first publication in the 1908 Kew Bulletin of Miscellaneous Information.  Not a bad start for a durian.  

By piecing together the dry scraps of information provided by other botanists (seriously, how do they make a durian boring? It’s a durian.) I’ve pieced together this picture of Durio mansoni: a perfectly round fruit small enough to hold in the palm of the hand covered in an incredibly dense, hairlike network of thorns. Each section contains one or two seeds covered in a very thick layer of something yummy.

Botanical descriptions don’t include the color of the fruit, outside or inside, although it is mentioned that the flowers are red. These are Durio mansoni flowers.

Durio mansoni is the only species endemic to Thailand and Myanmar. It was first collected in Tenerassim, Myanmar. It can be found just over the border in Thailand,  on the peninsula between Bangkok and Phang-nga.

It flowers between February and April.

If finding information about Durio mansoni was difficult, finding out who was involved in naming it was like trying to bust into a Durio graveolens with your bare hands. It ain’t happening.

My research was muddied further by the fact that google search frequently confuses Durio mansoni with Schistosoma mansoni, a particularly nasty parasitic worms that lives in freshwater snails in tropical countries. Like where I am now.  

I then tried to discover if there was a relationship between Mansoni the worm and Mansoni the fruit. All I came up with was this extremely disturbing image. Scared to go swimming in Borneo? You should be.

I can’t believe this is real.

What I can find is that Durio mansoni was collected in Myanmar in 1905 by F.B. Manson. Whoever F.B. was, he probably wasn’t the influential botanist Frederick Manson Bailey, who never left his obsessively beloved Queensland.

The name “mansoni” was bestowed by James Sykes Gamble, an English botanist who settled in northern India, really really far away from where durians grow. It’s unlikely he ever saw this durian. Since he was the director of the Imperial Forest School, he probably had dried up scraps of leaves and flowers sent to him in a box and examined it over tea and scones.

It was published anonymously in 1908 in the Kew Bulletin of Miscellaneous Information as Boschia mansoni, back when “Boschia” was all the rage. Several of the durians are ex-boschias.

Bakhuizen Van Den Brink elevated it to Durio in 1924. And apparently botanical interest in those “big, succulent arils” ended there.