The Tree (27 page)

Nowadays, of course, eucalypts grow throughout the world: Californians, Indians, Africans, even Mediterraneans may be surprised to learn that they are, in origin, so emphatically Australian. The first specimen (in fact, of
E. obliqua
) was sent to Europe in 1777. Charles-Louis L’Héritier de Brutelle coined the name
Eucalyptus
in 1788. But by about 1790 eucalypts had already been taken to India. By 1804 they were growing in France. Then to South America: Chile in 1823, Brazil in 1825. South Africa acquired them in 1828, Portugal in 1829.

At first they were grown in botanic gardens, and their transition into commerce wasn’t always smooth. The first imports had little genetic variety and did not necessarily lend themselves to much improvement. Some of those transferred from botanic gardens to plantations turned out to be hybrids. The first generation of hybrids—“F1”—often grows very well. But in subsequent generations the genes are mixed up (“recombined”) and the F2s, F3s, and so on are completely inconsistent. It took time, therefore, to create colonies of trees that performed well, bred true, and yet were not too inbred.

Nevertheless, it was clear from the early nineteenth century that the right eucalypts in the right places could grow at an astonishing rate. Plantations were soon established in Brazil and South Africa, to help build railways and provide fuel for locomotives; in Brazil they were also used for charcoal, for smelting iron and making steel; and in Chile and South Africa for mine pit props. Eucalypts were also deployed widely as windbreaks and for land reclamation. The oil from their leaves was a bonus. Since the aroma was thought to discourage the mosquitoes that carry malaria, they became known as “fever gums” and were planted more enthusiastically than ever. Their flowers also provide bees with honey.

In the twentieth century, eucalypts were cultivated more and more for the great mass of short and uniform fibers in their wood, valued for paper for all purposes, from decrees nisi to disposable nappies. But still the wagon rolls on, and eucalyptus is being used more and more in construction—for sawn wood, MDF (medium-density fiberboard), veneers, and even in plastics. More humbly, eucalypts have become hugely important for fuel in rural communities in India, China, Vietnam, Peru, and Ethiopia. Indeed, eucalypts are now grown in more than ninety countries. The total area of plantation seems hard to estimate: some say around 23.5 million acres in 1999, rising to 28.6 million by 2010; some say 39.5 million in 1999, rising to 49.4 million by 2010. In any case, it’s a lot—though much less than the 320 or so million acres reckoned to grow wild in one form or another in Australia (although Australia also has plantations). The growth rate of eucalyptus becomes more and more fabulous. The average worldwide is probably about 8 cubic meters of timber per acre per year, but some plantations claim to achieve 24 cubic meters. The big and popular
Eucalyptus grandis
typically achieves 16 cubic meters per acre per year and is harvested, as sizable trees, in six to eight years.

Beyond doubt, eucalypts are immensely valuable. Beyond doubt, too, they are a bandwagon: the more that is invested in them, the more their genetics and biology are studied, the more they are “improved,” and the more the gap grows between them and other species that should be given more of a chance. In much of the world they have become weeds, ousting the native flora. In some places, because of their great thirst and their supreme ability to drag water from the depths, they dry the land too much for native species to cope—and this among other things encourages fire that tips the ecological balance in their favor even more. So eucalypts overall are a mixed blessing. Their safe and advantageous deployment requires aesthetics, restraint, and good husbandry, and not just an eye for the expedient. That, of course, is true of life as a whole.

L
INDENS
, C
ACAO
,
AND
B
AOBABS
: O
RDER
M
ALVALES

The Malvales are named for the Malvaceae family—which has always been a most intriguing family and, as modern taxonomists get to work, is becoming more so. Traditionally the Malvaceae included the homely mallows,
Malva,
and the English garden hollyhock,
Althaea,
but also the more exotic
Hibiscus,
including
H. esculentus,
whose fruits manifest as okra, alias lady’s fingers, alias bindhi; and the cotton plant,
Gossypium,
whose hairy seeds, even more than the latex of the rubber tree, have changed the world. Yet modern DNA studies suggest that Malvaceae should be defined even more broadly. According to Judd, several families that have traditionally enjoyed independence—including several of very significant and sometimes extraordinary trees—should now be subsumed within the Malvaceae. These include the Tiliaceae, Sterculiaceae, and Bombacaceae. Thus the newly styled Malvaceae is rich and various indeed. For the purposes of this book, Malvaceae in the old sense would hardly deserve a mention at all, but in its new form it certainly does. In the following account, however, both for general ease and to facilitate cross-reference to traditional texts, I shall stick to the old-style family names.

Tiliaceae is the family of the limes, alias lindens, and the American basswood (where “bass” is pronounced with a short “a” as in the fish, not as in the large guitar). Limes put up with heavy pruning and thus are often butchered as street trees (though they get their own back by attracting aphids, which secrete gum, which in turn attracts fungi, and so coat the cars parked beneath in what seems like tacky soot), but when allowed to grow to full magnificence they are unsurpassed in avenues, seen wondrously in English estates and in Berlin’s Unter den Linden, the lovely road that once ran from the Brandenburg Gate to the palace of the Kaiser Wilhelm. Lime timber is excellent. Europe’s
Tilia cordata
makes musical instruments and fine furniture (including the carved fronts of many a pulpit). America’s basswood,
T. americana,
is used for turnery (and even before America had lathes it was used for bowls, if the wedding sequence from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s
Hiawatha
is to be believed: “Sumptuous was the feast Nokomis / Made at Hiawatha’s wedding. / All the bowls were made of bass-wood / White and polished very smoothly”). Limes are pollinated by bees and provide excellent honey. Several other members of the Tiliaceae family provide fibers for ropes, notably of the genus
Corchorus,
grown in India and to some extent in Africa for jute. The West African danta,
Nesogordonia papaverifera,
provides fine flexible timber used for everything from telegraph poles to gunstocks, carriages, boats, and veneers.

The name of the Sterculiaceae family comes from the Latin
stercus,
meaning “dung.” The huge “wild almond” (up to 36 meters) of India is called
Sterculia foetida
(“stinking”), as if to emphasize the point. As D. V. Cowen writes in her classic
Flowering Trees and Shrubs in India
(6th ed., Bombay: Thacker and Co., 1984): “Coming across a wild almond in bloom one’s first thoughts would be that one was near an open sewer and many parts of the tree when bruised or cut emit this rank, unpleasant odor. It is unfortunate as the tree is extremely handsome: tall and straight, its well shaped crown swathed in deep coral, often without a single touch of green, it stands out among the surrounding verdure in great beauty and dignity.” Flowers of ordurous odor (there are many such) are invariably pollinated by flies. As always in the genus
Sterculia,
the flowers come out before the leaves. The fruits develop in April soon after the leaves appear and, says Mrs. Cowen, they are “large as a man’s fist, woody and purse-shaped…like odd, dark objects casually thrown into the tree.” Yet the wild almond has many good points. The leaves and bark are medicinal, a useful gum comes from its trunk and branches, the bark yields fibers for cord, and the seeds can be eaten when cooked. For good measure, the wood does not split and is used for spars. (D. V. Cowen was a true memsahib: a fine hostess who also painted and wrote beautifully about plants, and also a competent birder and a champion golfer. Her book is a grand piece of publishing. Everyone should own a copy. I got mine in Delhi.)

There are many other fine genera of trees in the Sterculiaceae, too, as well as some shrubs and climbers.
Pterygota
has wooden fruits almost as big as a croquet ball, packed with winged seeds. It includes some fine, tall avenue trees and others that yield valuable dark-flecked yellowy timber.
Heritiera
from Southeast Asia yields the dark, much-valued hardwood mengkulang.
Theobroma cacao
is cacao:
Theobroma
means “food of the gods.”
Cola nitida
and
C. acuminata
are the trees that provide kola nuts, the original ingredient of the soft drinks, the political and economic influence of which this past hundred years can hardly be overestimated.

Perhaps most remarkable of all the extraordinary trees in the Bombacaceae family is the baobab tree,
Adansonia digitata,
also known as the monkey-bread tree. Of the eight remaining species, seven are indigenous to Madagascar; one also grows naturally in Africa; and one more is indigenous to northern Australia. It used to be thought that the baobab was another ancient Gondwanan genus, with just a few species surviving on various Gondwanan landmasses. But DNA studies suggest the genus arose in Madagascar, long after the breakup of Gondwana—and that a few seeds managed to float across the Indian and Pacific oceans and took hold in Africa and Australia. These things happen. Several species have also been distributed by human beings and, for example, there are now plenty of baobabs in India.

Their appearance is extraordinary. They are not on the whole outstandingly tall (up to about 20 meters or so) but the trunk is swollen with water, filled to bursting like an overstuffed sausage, and can be huge: up to 10 meters in diameter, or 33 meters in girth. The mop of twisted (but often vast) branches at the top look more like roots. Thus have arisen various myths. One has it that all the animals were given trees of their own. The baobab went to the hyena—who was so disgusted by it that he turned it upside down. Another version has it that the first ever baobab was extremely beautiful—and far too proud of its beauty. So the gods, to punish its conceit, stuck it back in the ground the wrong way up. The story echoes that of Arachne in Ancient Greece—far too proud of her sewing for the gods’ liking, and turned into the world’s first spider.

In truth, the trunks serve as giant water butts, so the baobab is marvelously resistant to drought. The spongy timber is of little use, but the rest of the tree is very valuable indeed. The enormous flower buds—“like balls of pale-green suede,” says Mrs. Cowen—open to form big, creamy-white flowers that appear at midnight one day in July and are wilted by morning. (Many plants flower remarkably briefly: clearly they have enormous confidence in the animals that pollinate them.) After the flowers come the fruits, white and gourd-like. The woody shell is rich in protein and in Africa is used to feed livestock, while in India, Gujarati fishermen tie them to their nets as floats, and monks employ them as water pots. The seeds provide valuable oil. Each seed is surrounded by pulp (which goes powdery), and is extremely rich in vitamin C; in both Africa and India it makes a cooling drink that protects against scurvy and is otherwise medicinal. The pulp is held in position around the seeds by small fibers that are used for stuffing cushions. The leaves are eaten too, and strong rope is made from the bark. In Gujarat the baobab is known as
gorak chinch
after a monk, Gorak, who taught his disciples under the shade of one. In Zimbabwe Phytotrade Africa is marketing baobab products—part of its broad initiative to gain economic value from native plants for the benefit of local people.

Nobody knows how long a baobab may live. They are so vast, so monumental, the biggest seem to be thousands of years old. But they grow very quickly, and perhaps five hundred or so years is the limit. Age is particularly hard to judge because, with age, they grow hollow—and then, perhaps with further hollowing, they are put to all kinds of uses. Often they are filled with water, as village reservoirs. The hollow spaces may be as big as a fairly sizable suburban dining room—and some in their time have served as pubs and post offices. Spookily, Africans sometimes inter their dead in hollow baobabs, whereupon, in the dry heat, the bodies mummify without further treatment. It is wise to take care when entering a hollow baobab.

There are still more outstanding Bombacaceae.
Bombax
is the genus of the various ceiba trees: their seeds are hairy (like the cotton plant, of which they are of course distant relatives) and the hairs, known as kapok, are used for stuffing mattresses, sleeping bags, Mao Tse-tung–style quilted jackets, and what you will. Ceiba trees are widely grown. I have enjoyed the shade of some truly magnificent
Bombax ceiba
growing as specimen trees in Belém in Brazil, defining the boundaries of the cathedral garden there. India’s red silk cotton,
Bombax malabarica,
is found throughout India and into Malaysia and Myanmar, and is now cultivated widely in the tropics, including Africa. Several other trees are also called “silk cotton,” with variously colored flowers (white, yellow), some of which belong to the Bombacaceae and some of which do not. The form of the cottony seed has been widely adopted, and clearly has evolved more than once.

Like
Sterculia, Bombax
trees produce their flowers when the limbs are bare of leaves. Those of the red silk cotton are bright red through pink to orange, and fall to the ground to be eaten by deer—or by the villagers, who put them in curries. The finger-like fruits that follow the flowers harden and split to release the cottony seeds, which, before the wind does its work, seem to smother the tree in cotton wool. Crows, bulbuls, mynahs, rosy pastors, sunbirds, and flower-peckers flock to feast on the oily seeds, though monkeys seem to be deterred by the vicious spikes on the smooth gray trunk and branches. The wood, whitish, soft, and light, is known as “simul” and is used for dugout canoes, floats, matches, and coffins.