The Whole Story of the Koh Samui Durian Magic Garden

The first time I visited Koh Samui in 2013, I thought durian was kind of new to the island, a small cash crop to replace the dying coconut fields and capitalize on newfound durian fiending in China.

I was very wrong.

When we came back in 2025, I realized that the majority of the interior hills of Koh Samui island are durian farms (totaling over 13,700 rai, or 11% of the whole landmass) – and the durian production here is valued at over 5 BILLION baht (154 million USD), an amount set to triple in the next 3-5 years.

Durian here is way more important than coconuts – and the Koh Samui Durian Story is way older than I ever would have imagined. It starts over 100 years ago with the man who made the Magic Garden.

What Is Tarnim’s Magic Garden?

Whenever I googled “Koh Samui Durian” – which I randomly did between 2013 to 2025 every time it looked like I *might* have free time in August/September – I always find references to Tarnim’s Magic Garden (or in Thai น้ำตกตานิ่ม, Grandpa Nim’s Waterfall) and very little else (except that old blog post from 2013).

So when we headed out to seriously hunt Koh Samui durian, the first place we started was Grandpa Nim’s Magic Garden.

The garden is located in Na Mueang District, in the south of the island. As we drove up the steep hills around Khao Pom Mountain, we realized that on every side of the road was durian farms. Old farms, new farms, baby trees nestled under banana leaves. For our durian-keen eyes, it was an awe-inspiring drive.

Durians, after durians, after durians!

We arrived to the garden to find a small booth collecting tickets, a cafe with souvenirs and cold drinks, and several suped-up 4-wheel-drive songthaews in the parking lot ferrying tourists on day trips around the island’s interior.

We paid our ticket – 100 baht each – and descended the steep stairs into a shadowy, rocky ravine filled to the brim with moss-covered statues.

There were statues of forest gods, giant birds, dancing spirits and sprites of all shapes and sizes, and small odd animals scattered about the long granite shards of a waterfall.

If we were Thai tourists, we’d probably recognize many of these statues from folk stories or religious tales taught in school.

However, just being westerners who hang out in Thailand, we only recognized a few of the characters.

Like Prince Vessantara standing together with his two children and the evil Jujaka, characters from the Jataka Tales that recount the 500 reincarnated lives of the Buddha before he reached enlightenment.

Or the money frog, a popular talisman which was appropriately decorated with baht coins.

Most of the other tourists floated through, snapping a few selfies, and headed back up to waiting Super Songthaews. But we stayed, wandered, and peered at the durian trees on the ridges of the ravine.

Farmland started just where the rocky ravine ended, and many of the durian trees looked old.

There were durian trees on all sides of the magic garden, just beyond the statues.

According to every article or blog post I’d read before visiting, Grandpa Nim was a retired durian farmer who built this statue garden in his favorite resting spot. The statue garden was started in 1976, just as tourism was beginning on the island, and Grandpa Nim realized that the tourism industry was only going to grow.

Today, most of the interior “Samui Safari Trips” stop by his statue garden. It’s a very popular place.

The garden stands as his concrete memorial. His final resting place is a rectangular stone tomb just behind the cluster of temple dancer.

But his lasting impact is the hundreds of rais of durian farms we saw on the drive up the mountain.

So who was Grandpa Nim, and why durian?

The Durian Farms Grandpa Nim Left Behind

Ti was waiting for us on her motorbike in the parking lot of the Magic Garden. We hopped back in our truck and followed a short distance to her own durian farm, which was passed down to her from her grandpa – Grandpa Nim’s son Sanit.

When we arrived, she handed us a 124-page memorial book the family had compiled about Grandpa Nim’s life and work with durians – in the Thai language. I flipped through it, seeing old pictures of farms, royalty, people with durian.

Here – Ti pointed at a fuzzy black and white photo – was Grandpa Nim sharing a durian with his sons. Here was yellowed polaroid of Grandpa Nim presenting durian to the Crown Prince who is now King Rama X.

And here – pointing again – was the first durian tree Grandpa Nim grafted with Monthong, around 80 years ago. That tree, Ti said, is still alive, but located on another farm.

Grandpa Nim acquired a lot of land during his lifetime. When he passed in 1999, he owned around 600 rais (238 acres) and over 3,000 durian trees in the mountains, and more in the lowlands. The mountain farms were planted later in his life – in the 1960’s and 70’s – when Grandpa Nim was already 50+ years old.

Did you ever meet him? I asked.

Yes, she said. But he died when she was around 6 or 7 years old, so she doesn’t remember very much. Only that he was a very kind person.

She took us to a large flattened boulder under a durian tree. This was his favorite place to sit and rest from the sun, she said.

When he died, he divyed up the land among his surviving sons, giving them each about a 200 rai (79 acre) durian plot. That’s a lot of durian! Today, Ti’s main occupation is a durian farmer. She sells the durian to traders from Chumphon or Bangkok who make a contract every season, and spends the rest of the year taking care of the farm first planted by her great-grandfather.

The rest of the answers to my questions, she said, was inside the Memorial Book.

Koh Samui When Grandpa Nim Was Born

As soon as we left Ti’s farm, I flipped open the book again and started from the beginning.

Grandpa Nim Thongsuk was born on July 5, 1908, as the 6th child of Uan Thongsuk.

Mr. Uan had recently re-located his family from the north shore of Koh Samui to Na Mueang District in the south, where a lot of coconut-farming land was available for sale. He was by occupation a coconut farmer, but he also grew vegetables in the shade of the trees and had mangoes and Durian Baan (durians grown from seed).

Mr. Uan liked growing durian baan so much that the area around their house became known as Baan Suan Thurien – the house in the durian garden. On Google Maps today, the small river running by their farm is still marked as “Suan Thurien.”

Even in 1908 when Grandpa Nim was a baby, Koh Samui was not a remote backwater island. Diesel-fueled steamships stopped in at the pier every 3-4 days, unloaded cargo and passengers, and chugged away across the Gulf of Thailand.

Wind-powered sailing junks collected dried coconut meat, called copra, to take to processing plants in Surat Thani and Bangkok. The coconut industry was in its boom years – since whales were overfished, the world turned to coconut oil to light streets and houses and lubricate machinery. When margarine was invented in 1902, the world started eating coconut oil too.

Koh Samui coconuts were famous. The island may not have had asphalted roads or multi-story buildings, but almost the entire island was actively farmed.

In April 1915, when Grandpa Nim was 6 years old, naturalist H.C. Robinson visited Koh Samui, arriving by steamship. He wrote:

The hill sides, in a very considerable height, have been much demanded of their original timber, little control being exercised over the local population, which annually destroys much jungle for the plantations of hill rice, which, when abandoned, are overgrown with a worthless secondary growth of bamboo and thorny shrubs.

The population is large, and was said by the local magistrate to exceed 8,000 people, who subsist by the growth of rice and fruit, large quantities of coconuts being exported to Bangkok, and fruit, principally areca nuts and mangoes, to Bandon [modern-day Surat Thani Town].

In the Memorial Book, the family estimates that around 90% of the islanders were coconut farmers when Grandpa Nim was a child. And yes – trained monkeys harvested the nuts. Even Robinson, writing in 1915, mentions them.

The local school offered only 2 grades, so Grandpa Nim was done with his formal education early – but he loved to learn. He especially loved listening to agricultural programs on the radio. In 1947, Kasetsart University started an Agricultural Program on Channel 8 broadcasting advice on everything from growing vegetables to chicken-farming, financial advice, and even tutorials on how to graft fruit trees.

That first broadcaster’s title was Luang Suwanwajokkasikit หลวง สุวรรณวาจกกริกิจ – which roughly translates as “Talking about agriculture makes money.”

The post-war government ramped up support for farmers. Under Prime Minister Phibunsongkram in the late 1940’s, the Ag department also began hosting local Vegetable and Fruit Competitions with prizes.

Grandpa Nim won a contest for vegetable farming. As his prize, he was sent to a fruit-farming conference in Nakhon Si Thammarat. It was likely his first trip off island, and seems to have sparked a life-long interest in grafting, fruit-tree propagation, and planting different cultivars.

After that trip, he started traveling up and down Thailand’s east coast looking for good-quality fruit cultivars. One of his first trips was to Pattani, to find the “Jeh Hmong” เจ๊ะโหมง” rambutan, a special type of pineapple and the now-famous Chogun mandarin orange ((ส้มโชกุน). He brought them back to Koh Samui, and propagated the trees. The oranges didn’t grow well, but the rambutans did.

After just a few years, boats laden with Koh Samui rambutans headed off to Surat Thani every season.

It’s hard to believe now, but in the 1940’s and 1950’s the most common cargo boat was still the Three-Masted Sailing Junk, without engines or motors. These cargo ships plied the Thai Gulf well into the late 1970’s.

This was the type of boat Grandpa Nim boarded when he went to Bangkok to fetch the new-fangled durian varieties being talked about on the radio. It took 3 days to sail to Bangkok, and 3 days to sail back. The memorial book places this first trip around 1951.

Grandpa Nim Hunting Durian in Bangkok (1950’s)

His son Sanit explained that Grandpa Nim loaded the junk with mangoes, coconuts and mined ore, like tungsten or tin, to trade in Bangkok. After collecting money, he bought durian trees – “no matter how expensive they were, he wasn’t afraid to buy them,” wrote Sanit.

The survival rate was low. On that first trip, out of around 30 grafted trees purchased in Bangkok only 2 or 3 survived. The waves, the salty wind and the sun on the open-deck junk likely killed them.

So Grandpa Nim went back again. And again, and again.

In around 1954, he went twice. He likely visited the Bangkhen Agricultural Fair at Kasetsart University, which had subsidized trees for sale, and then came back for the Durian Competition in June, which was open for contestants from around the country. Over 102 contestants came with their best – including Grandpa Nim.

That’s where he may have first met influential Durian Promoters who were filling the agricultural journals and radio stations with encouragement to grow durian. The 1950’s were a difficult time for the traditional gardens around Bangkok and Nonthaburi – Bangkok was urbanizing fast, and the environmental impacts from digging out the mouth of the river, building a dam, and cementing over canals to build roads had made the area inhospitable for growing durian or even other fruits in scale.

It was an opportunity for people from other provinces to step up and do fruit farming, both to feed Bangkok’s expanding appetite but also to export to the rest of the world. By this time, Japan, Taiwan and the USA had acquired the taste for durian.

Among the most “durian influential” people Grandpa Nim met was Phra Banjerd พระบรรเจิดวิชาชาญ, the author of Durian Knowledge (1955).

It was from Phra Banjerd that Grandpa Nim got his first Monthong Durian Tree. Wrote his son Sanit:

Later that year, there was a durian competition in Nonthaburi again. Father went to see again. The Mon Thong durian from Khun Phra Banjerd’s orchard won first prize. Khun Phra Banjerd was very protective of this durian variety, but he gave Father a branch. Father took it use a starter on Koh Samui.

In the end, Grandpa Nim brought back to Koh Samui all the durian varieties recommended at the time for a commercial farm – Ganyao, Chanee, Kob Mae Tao, Yam Phe, Kradumthong, Thong Yoi Chat, Dao Kra Jai. His sons estimate he brought back around 300 trees total, and with those 300 trees made thousands to populate the whole island.

Grandpa Nim Expands To Big Scale Durian Farming

Eventually, he decided that Monthong was the variety that grew best in his farms, and had the thickest meat. So in the 1960’s he began converting both the family’s old Durian Baan trees and some of the new trees he’d planted to Monthong.

Grandpa Nim believed in the future of durian so much that he started trading his coconut farms in the lowlands for the worthless, slashed-and-burned scrub-lands around Khao Pom mountain.

His neighbors must have thought he was crazy, giving up his producing coconut trees for empty land – especially as in the 1960’s there weren’t even roads up the mountain yet.

But by the time Grandpa Nim’s durian trees were producing, he already had a ready market in Bangkok.

From all his trips over the years to buy trees, he was a well-known figure in Nonthaburi and Bangkok, and was able to use his connections to immediately start shipping the cut-harvested durians to Bangkok by boat. He paved the durian future.

Today over 1500 families on Koh Samui are registered as durian farmers, and almost all of them sell by seasonal contract directly to buyers in Bangkok or China. Very few durians get sold on Koh Samui itself. That’s why you as a tourist, may be so surprised to find out this rigorous durian trade has been going on right beneath your nose.

Grandpa Nim was not just a retired durian farmer with a statue hobby. He was THE first serious durian farmer, the one who started the whole Koh Samui Durian industry.

The First Durian Orchard in Koh Samui

At the bottom of Khao Pom mountain, we tried to find the oldest Monthong durian tree on Koh Samui. It’s located inside of Uan Thongsuk’s old Durian Baan Farm, the farm that gave the area the name Suan Thurien.

Ti gave us the farm’s approximate location on Google Maps, and we had a photo in the memorial book.

We parked on the bridge over Khlong Suan Thurien, and sure enough there was a very old durian farm on both sides of the Ring Road that circles the island.

We pulled out the book and started looking at the photos.

The road we were standing on has definitely been expanded and raised up since the tree was photographed for the book.

We looked at the shapes of that tree, at its drooping branches, photographed a good 20 or 30 years in the past. This was likely one of great-great-grandpa Uan Thongsuk’s durian baan trees, top-worked with Monthong.

We walked back and forth along the farm, pointing at trees. The left side of the road had the mountains clearly visible in the background. In the book, there were no mountains behind the tree, so the tree should be on the sea-side of the road.

In the end, we settled on this tree looking the most similar.

What do you think? Did we find Grandpa Nim’s oldest surviving durian tree?

Ready to visit a Koh Samui Durian Farm?

So now you know the whole Koh Samui Durian Story.

The whole island is full of old trees dating back to the 1970’s or even earlier. It’s definitely a rich place for a durian lover to have their ideal durian vacation – beaches, mountains, what more could you ask for?

According to Ti, you can request durian at the Magic Garden through your tour operator if you follow one of the Safari Day Trips. She has chosen not to open her farm to tourists.

To find farms open to visitors and some durian stalls specializing in Koh Samui Durian, don’t miss our Koh Samui Durian Guide.

And if you loved this historical deep dive into the nerdy side of durian, don’t forget to leave us a comment and let us know!

Thailand Durian Hunting Map

Use this map to find durian farms, farmstays, and durian markets where you can have an amazing durian-feasting experience 😋