pine island Vietnamese fruit farms entrance
Photography by Anna Nguyen

How Vietnamese Farmers Put Down Roots on Pine Island

Generations of agricultural knowledge are yielding mangoes, lychees, longans and other fruits that connect local families to Vietnam.

by

Food + Drink

The road to Pine Island runs low and straight, a dark thread over flat expanses of tangled mangrove. Above them, in the hard white light, another kind of Florida rises in dense canopies of green. Not pines, despite the island’s name, but mango, lychee and longan in languid measured rows. 

“In Southeast Asia, the clay holds the water around the tree,” Charlie Ho, owner of Hot Tropic Fruit Farm - Vườn Trái Cây, says. “Here, the roots go down hunting. Same sun, different path—and flavor.” He notes how the Gulf Coast’s lean, thirsty soils concentrate the fruit, coaxing a sticky sweetness from jackfruit while longan swell with sugar and mangoes pack into a dense, creamier flesh. 

Fifteen years ago, Vietnamese-American families arrived, drawn by word of a frost-free landscape reminiscent of the fertile Mekong Delta. They joined Pine Island’s modern tropical-fruit tradition, which emerged in the 1980s as growers expanded backyard groves into commercial mango farms. But instead of planting orchards devoted to a single crop destined for wholesalers, they recreated layered vườn trái cây, or fruit gardens, where fruit trees, sugar cane and herbs share the same earth in overlapping rows.

From May to September, when the tropical bounty is at its peak, visitors follow Stringfellow Road north from Matlacha and watch for hand-painted signs and crowded shell lots, marking the way to three Vietnamese u-picks clustered along the island’s center. 

Near the sagging docks of Saint James City, a modest archway announces Vườn Trái Cây La Vang Orchard, the island’s first commercial Vietnamese-owned farm, opened in 2016. Owner Jimmy Bùi and his wife Cathy Nguyễn shaped the orchard after Western Vietnam’s countryside. Rather than imposing the geometric order of an American grove, he let the property’s damp, winding contours dictate the layout. A broad pond, bright with koi, water lilies and a houseboat like those that ply the Mekong, anchors the farm, while narrow waterways thread through the property, echoing the delta’s canal system. Wild grasses hide even a hint of a path and require boots no matter the season. Rickshaws and Honda motorcycles linger in the heat. 

Jimmy named the farm for Our Lady of La Vang, Vietnam’s national shrine to the Virgin Mary, who is said to have appeared to persecuted Catholics hiding in the Quảng Trị Province forest in 1798. Near the entrance, his family built a small temple, red and gold against the glare. “When the fruit comes in, we choose the nicest pieces for the altar first,” Cathy says. “The living eat after the dead are honored.”

For refugees who fled to the U.S. post-Vietnam War, La Vang orchard has become a pilgrimage site, a place to buy the fruits of home and to leave offerings at Mary’s feet. Most mornings, custard apples crowd her stone base. In Vietnam, fruit is never just fruit. Often tucked into a traditional southern Vietnamese Mâm Ngũ Quả (Five-Fruit Tray) with cherimoya, coconut, papaya and mango, the names create the homophonic sentence cầu dừa đủ xài, pray for just enough to spend. It is a way of living that keeps a person from losing themselves in hunger or in wealth.

Clusters of concrete benches crowd the thatched-roof stand inscribed with thanksgiving for answered prayers and the names of adopted cities stretching from Pennsylvania to Key West.   

Minutes up Stringfellow Road at Hot Tropic, Charlie stands in a mango row. He and his wife, Bach, approach tropicals as a form of tu dưỡng—a self-cultivation where the land shapes the grower as much as the grower shapes the land. “The farm will show you who you are by how you treat the things that depend on you,” Charlie says. They share this philosophy openly, welcoming visitors into their practice with bilingual signage; guided, one-hour golf cart tours through the 14 acres of fields; and an intentional emphasis on varietal diversity and terroir. 

On tours, he speaks about the orchard in layers, moving from botany to plant-based medicinal traditions to the relationships among people, place and fruit. When Hurricane Ian hit in 2022, salt-burned leaves hung limp from branches, and uprooted limbs blocked every path. “It looked like a burned farm,” Bach recalls. “No green anywhere.” Neighbors advised cutting the damaged trees back hard and even, into uniform stumps. Charlie refused. “You hurt your right arm,” he says. “You don’t cut your left arm to match.” Today, Hot Tropic holds 1,500 fruit trees, including 45 mango varieties and about 500 lychee trees spanning six cultivars, many of them prized in Southeast Asian kitchens over the traditional supermarket darlings.

Under the farm’s thick new growth, customers arrive in waves: a retired Ohio couple that returns every May, a teenager from Orlando filming the rows on his phone, a Vietnamese family from Miami, their shoulders easing as the milky perfume of a cut sugar apple reminds them of one shared on a rooftop in Cần Thơ. They drift through the farm’s sunlit market for Bach’s Vietnamese street food—crisp bánh mì, bowls of phở, spring rolls jeweled with herbs—then leave with lychees, dehydrated Nam Doc Mai, one of the most prized Asian cultivars, and frozen slices for winter.

Peeling off from Stringfellow Road, Frankie Lane Drive tracks south before a loose path slips away from the road as if losing its nerve, kinking once, then twice, spilling into a clearing at Vườn Trái Cây Island Fruit. Phuong Phung and his wife, resident chef Hoa, affectionately referred to by Vietnamese regulars as Cô and Chú (aunt and uncle), opened the farm in 2021, the same year as Hot Tropic. 

The couple originally left rural Vietnam for California, where refugee hubs had formalized into networks of “little Saigons,” but the dry Pacific Coast air and hard soil felt too unfamiliar. After hearing talk of a thin finger of frost-free land in Southwest Florida, the couple, along with their son, Martin, packed their bags and purchased an overgrown plot of flat Florida pine-land choked with wild saw palmetto and weeds. Rather than wait a decade for new trees to mature from seed, the trio initiated massive grafting operations. They cut back established rootstocks and spliced them with imported scions of rare Southeast Asian cultivars, like the bitter melon, a tropical gourd prized for its intense, sharp flavor, and dragon beans, which must be harvested within a precise four-day window and eaten immediately before they lose their exceptional crunch. Today, all three tend the 7-acre plot, while Hoa, each afternoon, kindles charcoal to grill the meats that draw crowds down the dirt path.

Starting at 11 a.m. daily in the summer, the kitchen starts rolling out plates of nhậu (social/drinking food), cooked outdoors over a makeshift, waist-high rectangle of dry-stacked concrete blocks. The menu mirrors the setting, favoring the rustic dishes served at orchard restaurants throughout southern Vietnam. 

The kitchen’s crown jewel is the gà nướng muối ớt—chili-salt-grilled chicken. Hoa grills the lean, free-ranging ‘walking chickens’ over charcoal until the skin crackles into a deep, savory sweetness. Hand-plucked sprigs of peppery rau răm—a Vietnamese coriander—and a bracing dip of coarse salt, red chilis and lime tuck in beside them. 

For those who left the waterlogged green blankets of Vietnam’s countryside, the transition to the wide, sterile landscape of the West demanded a reimagining of home. “Customers tell me they don’t need to visit Vietnam any longer, because it’s right here. We dug it out of this island with our own hands,” Martin says. 

Nearby, an elderly man wanders from his car to a jackfruit tree, lifts his hand and knocks a hanging fruit twice. The sound comes back low and sure. “In Sài Gòn, my mother carried two like this on a pole,” he says to his grandson. He knocks again and offers the boy his place. The small fist makes the same sound. For a moment, the distance between a market in 1960s Vietnam and this hot Pine Island afternoon narrows into the hollow of a single ripening fruit.