108 TREES

There are in this world strange men, nice men and then there are men who love trees! In Witbank one such man and his acolyte who simply adore trees, all trees from the pantyhose tree to the mighty Yellow wood.
Van Dyke Zeeman is his name and he came the other day to the estate to look at ours.
It turns out that we have many trees, 108 different species to be precise. That’s a lot of trees, in fact Mr. Zeemann has never seen so many on one estate before and from a man who does little other than visit proud landowners to ID their trees this is high praise indeed.

Van Dyke is a startlingly fit heavy smoking 75 year old who having retired from the dubious joys of running the financial affairs of the city of Witbank has devoted his remaining years to the study of South African trees.
He and his side kick Johann, arrived here a to add their knowledge to my trail with a weighty box or two of tree labels so that the hikers and I, with a couple of bemused tree label humpers, can be illuminated as to the name and genus of the vegetation they are passing We arrived at Gods Window camp early in the morning and spent an hour or two labeling just the trees that are a feature there alone, and indeed just around the camp there are about 30 species from Jasmine to parsley trees, starry rice bush trees and stunted Outeniqua yellow woods, candle wood and blackbird berry trees oh just to many to mention.

Well that was quite an exercise, but nothing compared to what was to follow. We trundled off down the Hells Bells trail, a walk that should take a couple of leisurely hours to navigate, but with these two tertiary dendrologists in tow, this little walk took the entire day. We hardly walked more than a couple of steps at a time without them getting into a little huddle over a leaf, by the time we got to the bottom my neck felt like I had been star gazing for a week, my head was bursting with all the new facts and tales of all things dendrological.
Did you know that the Transvaal Milkplum or Stamvrug tree known to its friends as ‘Englerophytum magalismontanum’ has a symbiotic relationship with ants rather than flying insects and so grows its flowers along its stem rather than at the end of its branches like most trees, well now you do and this was but a snippet of all the things I was told, sadly most of which went straight in one ear and out the other, there was just too to much to take it all in.

So all you tree lovers, you want to walk down a wonderful path and at the same time be illuminated as to all names of the trees, look no further than this trail, we have named a few hundred of the trees (many repeats) so you can really learn their names, and through that become aware of how little one knows about the wonderland that we live in and I think appreciate it all the more for that.