Tree 1: Yellowwood (Podocarpus latifolius) Tree 2: Protea (Protea caffra) Tree 3: Fever acacia (Acacia xanthophloea) Tree 4: Rose Gum (Eucalyptus grandis) Tree 5: Baobab (Adansonia digitata)

Many consider the ‘Big Five’ animals indispensable to a good safari inside the Rainbow Nation. Photographing elephant, rhinoceros (black or white, take your pick), leopard, buffalo and lion define many tourist treks to South Africa.

Perhaps it defines too many trips. The animals are so packaged these days that the challenge of spotting the animals has long disappeared. 

These days well-cushioned Land Rovers collect tourists direct from hotels and whiz around game reserves where exhibits of the five beasts emerge more or less on cue. The taxing days of Hemingway and the bleak and malarial hunt are long gone which is doubtless an improvement if a little less romantic.

But this is the puzzle. If a sort of High Table of the Animal Kingdom exists why is an important part of the Plant Kingdom – the Big Five trees – undecided? South Africa contains many fine Botanical Gardens perfect for promoting plants. And vegetation intuitively comes to mind when thinking of the southern Cape or the Drakensburg mountains or semi-arid savannah or karoo (desert or semi-desert) or just about anywhere rural in South Africa. Trees are also profitable. Over 300,000 South Africans work in forestry or related industries like furniture. Granted this is from a population nudging 45 million but is still sizeable.

So here is a plea for the South African government to hurry up and match the safari Big Five with an official and formal list of the Big Five of South African trees. The idea has floated around for too long to remain missing in inaction. 

My five suggestions? Podocarpus latifolius, the yellowwood; Protea caffra, the protea; Acacia xanthophloea, the fever acacia; Eucalyptus grandis, the Rose Gum; and Adansonia digitata, the Baobab tree. Boiling down their symbolism is a fools errand but might go something like this: yellowwoods for grandeur; protea for resilience; fever acacia for individuality; eucalypts for tolerance; and the curious baobab for determination.

This is a rbitrary, yes, in spades. And no claim is made that this list holds scientific or other logic. It is a personal selection and quite particular to South Africa. A different bundle would form a Big Five inside the great equatorial forests of central Africa for example.  

A little more controversially it is also worth remembering South Africa’s tree life is far from flush with naturally productive forests. Like it or lump it commercial forestry is about exotic species (as foresters describe foreign imports) and will be until further notice. European or Mediterranean pines dominate South Africa's plantations (53% is the official figure) and the remainder are trees from Australia like eucalypts (39%) and wattle (8%). Their rotations and harvesting cycles are simply too tempting. Where exotics harvest within as little as a decade (pulping) or two decades (timber) indigenous species like Eucaplyts can double this time. They just take too long to grow.  

Apartheid also deserves a passing mention. This madness so defined twentieth century South Africa it would be churlish to erase it from understanding twenty-first century South Africa. Within forestry the more shocking epithet is that whites comprised around 1-in-7 of the population and controlled around 1-in-50 of farms. Yet from such a minority they managed over 80 per cent of productive land. Shocking stuff. This imbalance happened as white-owned farms averaged 1,300 hectares – averaged – versus most farms of around five hectares. Put simply, during apartheid whites got to trifle with agribusiness and non-whites got trifle. 

How South Africa settles this (still evident) imbalance is an unfolding story. But undoubtedly an odd mix of large and small agricultural units will be around for some time and this ought to influence a Big Five of trees; a selection needs to work in various sizes of farms. 

This further suggests, to this writer anyway, that as well as smaller trees like the protea including a commercially invaluable introduced species within the Big Five of trees makes sense. Small farms will naturally favour this tree. Eucalyptus at least offers neutrality as, unlike the pine, it is neither from Europe nor South Asia where most non-black South Africans came from. Instead it symbolises another continent (Australasia) with a unique eco-system. Such a tree surely offers a special hope to represent the immigration that has moulded today's South Africa – or cursed according to your point of view. Can celebrating indigenous trees alongside at least one introduced tree harm South Africa? 

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If any tree deserves naming as the grandfather of South African trees it is the Yellowwood.

A tall evergreen appearing part monkey tree and part pine each tree has its distinctive shape. The trees appear around much of South Africa and especially within old growth forests or clear-fell areas where commercial plantations have not dominated the eco-system. Happily South Africa declared the Yellowwood the national tree during the 1970s. Now protected Yellowwoods appear increasingly often.

Less happily official protection arrived a century or more after the near annihilation of this graceful conifer. Early European settlers were not slow to notice Podocarpus wood is malleable yet produces a hard-wearing yellow look. Yellowwood features in many of South Africa’s grandest public buildings from floorboards to furniture. Churches, city halls and grand country houses also use the wood widely. Achieving such presence meant sacrificing huge swathes of old growth yellowwood especially in the southern Cape where the tree previously dominated. As more and more European settlers arrived the original temperate forests ebbed into oblivion. 

The Podocarpaceae family of trees are endemic in the Carribean and in Oceania, from Japan in the north to New Zealand in the south.

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Like Podocarpus the Protoceae family to which the protea belongs are widespread in the southern hemisphere. Nevertheless the oak-like appearance of protea wood and resilient flowers from these small but feisty trees commands a special presence in South Africa.

Protea already shares with the Yellowwood protected status. The esteem is so strong, indeed, that protea flowers are the national sporting symbol and feature on the crests of most national teams including the Springbok rugby team. Commentators often assume the flower reflects the dynamism and adaptablity of the Greek God Proteus who changed his appearance like a chameleon.

Protea would probably merit a place in the Big Five simply for their presence in the unique Cape Floral Kingdom, right at the tip of southern Africa. Various protea trees appear throughout the country’s natural forests. Most state forests and conservation areas contain some species of protea, including both mountain and lowland forests. The tree also appears widely in the Indian Ocean coastal belt forests. While South Africa’s forests may have a mixed record of management – mountain forests have survived much better than coastal forests – protea have survived and often prospered in nearly all settings. 

Why Protea caffra? True, many more protea species exist but caffra is arguably the most widespread. This explains why this species appeared as an icon on early South African coins. Often left while other timber was harvested the protea survived in mixed forests exposed to traditional-use. 

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The fever acacia is an incredibly distinctive South African tree. It displays the classic acacia look combining semi-deciduous and deciduous. It always looks sparsely foliated.

Fever acacia also displays an almost luminous lime-green bark difficult to forget. It is exceptional. Like protea the acacia is also omnipresent in South Africa. Their classic look is obvious in grassland. Over the 1.23 million square kilometres or so of South Africa grassland is the most common eco-system by some way. This is especially so on the veldt where plant cover is a messy and seemingly random mosaic of grasses and low shrubs. Interspersed within this rolling landscape is invariably the odd acacia. Species like the camel-thorn and white-thorn are instantly recognizable by the slightly domed crown. Like all indigenous acacia they have thorns where introduced acacia do not. 

Why the fever acacia over other acacia? Well, there are several thousand species of acacia and you have to start somewhere. The special green bark surely seals the matter for this rarely appears elsewhere in the world. The green bark is striking and on a sunny day holds almost surreal radiance. Granted the fever acacia is not too common for it favours water or swampy areas which were often malarial. But that is not so common now. 

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Selecting an introduced plantation species as part of a South African Big Five of trees will strike some as sacrilegious.

An Australian import included in a list of grand South African trees? Shurely shome mistake! But before jumping to conclusions it is worth thinking why this enormous tree merits inclusion. 

A central compelling reason is forestation. Owing to early years of uncontrolled greed and destruction afforestation and reforestation with commrcial species has been a massive feature in South African history. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, for example, South Africa planted around 10,000 ha of forest yearly. From 1920 to 1950, the years of war and destruction in Europe, this jumped to about 20,000 ha yearly and in the post-war years to around 30,000 ha. All told by 2000 there was something like 1.25 million hectares of forest in South Africa not present in 1900. 

This did not undo the harm of earlier centuries – it translates only to 1% of all South African land – but holds this fact. Nearly all the new forestation featured introduced species like the huge Eucalyptus grandis at over 30 meters tall and nearly one metre of growth each year. 

There is little sign this will reduce in the twenty-first century. The South African government estimates that by 2020 and assuming the economy will grow by around 4% a year – which is not unreasonable – the country needs a further 300,000 ha of new forestry. Much of this will be eucalypts.

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Distinctive looks aside the baobab tree deserves inclusion for both utility value and a special place in traditional African consciousness.

It is often a meeting place and a source of water. Large trees may hold several thousand litres of water. So special was the symbolims of the tree that the post-Apartheid government earmarked one of its honours as the ‘Order of the Baobab’: it was symbolic of endurance, tolerance, community and longevity. It has long been a valued symbol of vitality, a tree endowed with both magical and functional properties: it provides bark for cloth and rope, fruit, fuel and other useful products.’ 

Some criticism is probably fair as the boabab is, or was, endemic only in the northern parts of South Africa. But in recent years individuals have planted it more widely and anyway the yellowwood – South Africa’s national tree – arguably had a similar feature only it was more common in the south.

Adansonia digitata is also not the most beautiful tree. The digital appearance of the branches can look arthritic and the wide girth often appears like Siamese twins – two or more individuals joined irrevocably. Yet there are precious few members of this special and matchless species in Africa or elsewhere. 

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