Nguyen The Thinh told this story to the Vietnamese newspaper Thanh Nien. He first saw these flowers on a web page of the Quoc Hoc school in the city of Hue. Large trees grew in the schoolyard, and during the flowering season they were covered in a bright pink cloud. Fallen petals carpeted the ground like a living rug. It was a plant of the legume family, Gliricidia sepium, which Vietnamese call by various names: do-may, hong-may, or simply "fence post," because its branches are often used for living hedges. Later, visiting a friend in Hue, Nguyen The Thinh saw such a hedge in person — it was entirely covered in pink flowers.
His family owns a plot of land behind the Dien Nam–Dien Ngoc industrial zone, in the former province of Quang Nam — in essence, just a sandy hill. In summer the sand heats up so much that locals joke that "even chickens need sandals." There was no electricity there, only a well with a petrol pump, and the water soaked instantly into the dry ground, so it seemed nothing but cacti could grow there. One day, seeing that trees were being pruned in that same Hue schoolyard, Nguyen The Thinh asked for a few branches, loaded them into his pickup and drove them home. That was how he began planting his garden.
To his surprise, the cuttings took root. The plant proved drought-resistant: the more sun, the lusher the flowers. At first he watered the seedlings, and then he left them to grow on their own. A cutting planted in the sixth month of the lunar calendar can produce its first flowers by New Year. The branches of this tree are brittle and snap easily if bent, but strong wind does not frighten them — they simply sway without resisting. Over eight years the seedlings have grown into large trees with broad crowns.
In the first years the trees flowered whenever they pleased: sometimes before the Lunar New Year, sometimes after. Over time, Nguyen The Thinh learned how to make them bloom exactly for the holiday. At the end of the eighth month of the lunar calendar, he prunes the excess branches. Such pruning before the season of winds and typhoons is beneficial in itself, and most importantly, in his words, afterward the buds become larger, the flowers bigger, and the petals denser and longer-lasting. The author notes that this is his personal experience, which depends on the local climate. In the mountains of Quang Tri province, where these trees also grow, they are not pruned: there, in his observation, there are many small branches and the flowers turn out less sturdy.
And so the bare sandy hill became a grove. The trees are planted along the perimeter of the plot, but from the outside it looks like a real forest. During the flowering season young people come here, although it is not a tourist spot. Thanks to the trees, the wasteland has come to resemble a park. One tree, also eight years old, grows in front of Nguyen The Thinh's house. Its trunk already looks like that of an old tree, and during the flowering season it is very beautiful. At New Year, he says, no one passes by without stopping to take a photo. "You don't need to go anywhere to admire the flowers — it's enough to open the door," he writes.
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