NATURALISING AUSTRALIAN TREES IN SOUTH AFRICA - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 201

Early diffusion: difficulty with Australian trees
The majority of Australian seeds entered southern Africa in the nineteenth century
through the Cape Colony, though settlers in Natal and to a lesser extent the Free
State and Transvaal all received and planted Australian trees (Beinart, 2003: 96).
Cape settlers worked hand-in-hand with the government to plant Australian trees.
One estimate suggested that the Department of Forestry sent out 300 million Acacia
seeds alone to Cape colonists from 1882 to 1893 (Shaughnessey, 1980: 41; van
Sittert, 2000: 660). Unfortunately, this massive distribution of seeds did not
produce the desired results: problems with classification and provenance, a lack of
prior experimentation, and unrealistic expectations led to disappointment in the
last two decades of the nineteenth century when planted Australian seeds failed to
grow (if they did at all) into the trees that the settlers had hoped they would.
To successfully grow an exotic tree first required that the planter knew the
correct classification of the seed. But determining the botanical classification of
Australian genera and species confounded settlers and even expert botanists.
Eucalyptus classifications, in particular, proved troublesome. Genetic variations and
local environmental influences can cause two trees of the same species to produce
different leaf shape and growth forms. Australian collectors notoriously misclassified
the species and provided poor geographical information on the regions from which
they sourced seeds. Maiden discussed this problem candidly in a letter to the
Agriculture Department of the Cape Colony: 'I cannot place your order in the
hands of nurserymen, as their collectors are not at present sufficiently educated in
regard to the difficult genus Eucalyptus to enable me to trust their naming.' 5 In
another letter, Maiden told Hutchins to tell him if '[i]f any unusual proportion of
the seeds fails to germinate, or if the seeds appear to be wrongly named, or to be
under names different to those under which you have previously received them'. 6
The same species planted in southern Africa often looked different than it did
in Australia, making many published botanical guides inaccurate. 'No Genus is so
perplexing as Eucalyptus in the matter of discrimination of species', the Cape Town
botanist Peter MacOwan wrote, 'especially when as here, they have grown in fresh
woods and pastures new, different from their Australian home, and have taken on
a new habit' (MacOwan, 1893: 32). Questionable classifications led many settlers
to call different species by the same name. MacOwan wrote an exasperated response
to one settler who inquired about a specific species in 1894:
The so-called popular names are the cause of endless wrangling and mis-
understanding. Thus there are about twenty-five different White Gums, a
dozen Blue Gums, several Black Wattles, several Golden Wattles, and every
non-botanic grower vows that his particular blue or white or golden is the
real one and the rest are bogus pretenders.
(MacOwan, 1894: 40)
Settlers who planted Australian seeds did so with little knowledge of whether the
species they (supposedly) selected would actually grow in the regions where they