A plea for a tree - Francois Krige

The oldest Milkwood in South Africa - now fallen

At the heart of Platbos Forest in the Overberg stands a milkwood tree. It isn’t a very big tree: the canopy is about five metres high, and its trunk, about a metre wide, true to the name of the forest it grows in, is somewhat flattened and low to the ground. Hollowed and knotted, it leans at an angle. Milkwoods can grow much taller and faster. Elsewhere in the forest, where there is more underground water, there are trees double this height. But this tree is extraordinary: it has stood there for at least a thousand years.

These coastal trees are like icebergs: their massive root systems are way larger than the above-ground growth, which can struggle in the salt spray. Occasionally nature allows us, through water or wind erosion, a glimpse of the subterranean structure of these apparently stunted beings, hinting at their incredible age.

The trees produce pungent flowers in February every year, and then fruit, but the harsh, dry, windswept conditions they grow in mean that sexual reproduction, although preferable, often fails.

For this reason, milkwoods have become masters of what we call layering: a tree will ramble, lean, collapse – and where it lays its branches in the sand, the point of contact forms roots. Eventually, the old trunk or branch that connected the new rooted structure to the original tree rots away. In this way, milkwoods slowly walk through a forest, taking a step every few hundred years.

This old milkwood at the centre of our forest at Platbos grows on a slightly raised mound of nutrient-rich decomposing matter and soil, hinting that this thousand-year-old trunk is a reiteration of itself, grown on its own prior stump. For the ethereal, shape-shifting milkwood never really dies: the same genes are repeated over eons. It may well be that the entire forest is really just one tree, multiply cloned.

Things have been tough for Africa’s southernmost forest for a long time. The trees have learnt to reproduce in nutrient pockets of old rotting stumps. Parent trees send roots probing until a rich, moisture-retaining stump is found in the sandy soil, where it will send out suckers to propagate anew. The milkwood will have to share the tasty stump with a cluster of different forest species – canthiums, chionanthus, apodytes and others. Botanists call this unusual sharing phenomenon ‘facilitation’.

Perhaps of all the trees in our fynbos biome, these ancient ones embody best the miracle of life and endurance. They survive in an environment that has evolved to burn – but the fires have become hotter and more destructive in recent times. Milkwoods do not burn easily, but within a few hundred metres of the ancient Platbos tree stand the burnt-out skeletons of many others. They had endured for centuries, surviving regular, cooler fynbos fires, until invasive alien vegetation changed the fire regime and caused the inferno that killed them. A few kilometres away is the Franskraal forest, where a fire burnt thousands of milkwoods and invasives now run riot among the white, skeletal frames of those once beautiful trees. The next fire will erase their memory from the earth.

Milkwoods are protected by law, with hefty fines or imprisonment for offenders; but conditions for lethal fires in milkwood stands are routinely created through human negligence. It is us, in our short, climate-changing lifetimes, who have brought them their gravest threats. Firebreaks, alien clearing, and controlled fires are what the milkwoods are asking from us now. They have been our guardians since humans lived on the seashore, harvesting shellfish. They need us to be their guardians now.

‘The forest is a peculiar organism of unlimited kindness and benevolence that makes no demands for its sustenance and extends generously the products of its life and activity; it affords protection to all beings.’ – Buddhist Sutra