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From my Hide: It’s tree time again…

David Holt-Biddle on the new Trees of the Year.

IT’S as regular as Christmas, and for tree people almost as much fun – National Arbor Week. You know the Arbor Week story (and yes, that is the correct spelling) and this year it begins on this coming Sunday and ends next Saturday – a whole week to celebrate trees. Of course, I’ve always said that trees should be celebrated all year round as they are a beautiful and vital part of our natural environment, particularly down here.

This year’s Common Tree of the Year* is the Virgilia oroboides, the blossom tree or keurboom. It is not, however, indigenous to KwaZulu-Natal so although you are more than welcome to plant one in your garden, or anywhere else for that matter, it would be better to plant one of the Uncommon or Rare Trees of the Year, being a Grewia occidentalis**, a cross berry or kruisberrie, in isiZulu an iLalanyathi, iManhlele, or iKlolo. It’s a smallish, shrubby tree, decorative and good for the garden. The fruit is eaten by people, birds and animals and the leaves browsed by game (and stock, if you have cows in your garden), while the bark and leaves are used for a wide range of magical and medicinal purposes, especially for treating wounds. The wood is used for sticks and spears.

Happily, I can report that we have one in the garden. It’s not very spectacular, but it’s definitely a cross berry, and one has to wonder just how or why it acquired that name.

The other Uncommon or Rare Tree of the Year is Barringtonia racemosa, or powder puff tree, a poeierkwas boom. In isiZulu it’s an iBoqo. This is also known as a brackwater mangrove and they are found down here. It’s described as a ‘beautiful, decorative tree’ which carpets the water under it with its white flowers in season. Rather surprisingly, it grows well in dry conditions as well.

So, celebrate Arbor Week and plant a tree, or two.

And now for something completely different. The first new carnivore to be discovered in the western hemisphere in 35 years has popped up in South America.*** Locally called a olinquito, it is a raccoon-like creature native to Ecuador and Colombia, looking rather like a cross between a domestic cat and a teddy bear and weighing in at about a kilogram, according to the scientists who identified it. And they would be from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in the United States of America, who said, when asked why it had taken so local to identify the little guy, ‘Like so many animals in the rain forest, it only comes out at night. It’s wet, it’s dark, it’s socked in with cloud. It’s hard to find these animals’. It sounds rather cute to me.

And now I feel it appropriate to go hug a tree, perhaps one with a teddy bear in it, cheers!

*Department of Water Affairs and Forestry.

**Trees of Natal, Zululand & Transkei, Elsa Pooley, Natal Flora Publications Trust, Durban, 1993.

***The London Daily Telegraph.

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