I WAS in Mauritius once, covering a yacht race, but there was a huge fuss about a new hotel that was to be called the Royal Palm (a tree native to the Caribbean). I ignored the hotel, being more interested in the yachts and the yachties, but the thought came back to me the other day when I was considering our humble strelitzia nicolai, the Natal wild banana. As a matter of interest there are eight species of palm in South Africa, none of them the royal, and two of them are down here – the wild date palm, or phoenix reclinata, and the lala palm, or hyphaena coriacea.
The strelitzia is not a palm, but it is described as palm-like or banana-like. A little reading, however, told me that it very definitely has a royal heritage. The strelitzia nicolai is named after no less than Queen Charlotte of Mecklenberg-Strelitz, wife of King George III of England, and Grand Duke Nicolai Nikolayevich, grandson of Czar Nicholas the First of All the Russias. Not bad for a wild banana.
The strelitzia is of course ubiquitous on the South Coast and synonymous with it. It’s a most interesting tree, apart from (to my mind anyway) being very attractive, being much loved by monkeys for the flowers and below them the blue duiker, which eat the flowers dropped by the monkeys, then a wide variety of birds and butterflies too. It is also home to the banana bat, South Africa’s smallest, the one that flits around the Hide. And as far as we humans are concerned, some of us eat the seeds, the leaves are used to make rope and the floors of corn pits are lined with the leaves. As I said, not bad for a wild banana.
Staying with trees for a moment, I was complaining the other day about the cross berry, or grewia occidentalis that had crept up our Natal mahogany and brought much of it down during a storm last month. I discussed this with our resident botanist and indigenous tree man, Geoff Nicholls, who confirmed that the cross berry could become an enthusiastic climber or creeper and needed a firm hand. I went on a grewia hunt in our garden and a firm hand it was. Interestingly, though, the cross berry was one of last year’s Uncommon or Rare Trees of the Year, described in glowing terms with recommendations that it should be planted in abundance. Do so by all means, but heed Geoff’s advice.
And finally, I must just add what fun it is to have those banana bats flitting around the Hide in the gloaming. They come out at sundowner time (don’t we all?) and sweep around us as we sit in the growing gloom of the evening, feeding on mosquitoes and other airborne delights. Fun and very useful. Cheers!
Sources: Trees of Southern Africa, Keith Coates Palgrave, Struik, Cape Town, 2002, Trees of Natal, Zululand & Transkei, Elsa Pooley, Natal Flora Publications Trust, Durban, 1993, Making the Most of Indigenous Trees, Fanie & Julye-Ann Venter, Briza, Pretoria, 1996, and Wikipedia.
