No jacarandas trees in Pretoria
The municipality has confirmed that people can expect a future city without the jacaranda.
With a fungus slowly feeding off one of Pretoria’s most beautiful trademarks, the jacaranda tree, the municipality has confirmed that people can expect a future city without the jacaranda.
Pretoria is well known for its abundance of jacaranda trees boasting with more than 70 000 trees with their famous purple and sometimes white flowers.
But according to Selby Bokaba, executive director for strategic communications of the municipality, the beautiful trees are infested with a fungus known as ganoderma lucidum.
“This is a wood decaying fungus, also referred to as root rot disease.”
He explained that the fungus attacks sick and decaying trees but does not affect healthy trees with vigorous growth.
He added most of the city’s jacarandas are very old, some more than a hundred years old. New trees may not be planted, as jacarandas are seen as a category 3 invader. Thus a cityscape without jacarandas is inevitable.
Bokaba said that the fungus spreads when trenches are dug on the road reserve to install pipes and cable services.
“The spores of the fungus is present in the soil and as the roots of the trees are damaged when digging trenches, the trees are infected through these open
wounds.”
In order to avoid the fungus from spreading necessary precautions need to be taken.
“Any excavating around the trees should be done very carefully and
the damaged roots must be trimmed neatly with a pruning saw, covered with a tree seal and treated with a fungicide.”
Jason Sampson, the curator of the Manie van der Schijff Botanical Gardens at the University of Pretoria said that the jacaranda trees at the University’s botanical garden are looking very ill and that they might be infected by the fungus.
He added that because the jacaranda trees in Pretoria were planted so close to one another, it will also contribute to the fungus spreading quicker.
Sampson said that when the jacaranda trees root’s are infected, the fungus would eat away at the root, which leads to the tree dying and the branches breaking.
