NATURALISING AUSTRALIAN TREES IN SOUTH AFRICA - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 202

planted them. Trees could grow for a decade or more before showing signs of
disease or other deficiencies. Hutchins noted that, '[most] trees, unless they are
altogether unsuited to the climate and soil do well for a few years, perhaps the first
20 or 30 years' (Hutchins, 1905: 523). Inevitably, improperly classified seeds
planted in climates vastly different from their native habitats rarely grew into
healthy, valuable or useful trees. This led settlers to begin criticising eucalypts and
some wattles.
Of all species planted widely in the mid to late nineteenth century, none
attracted as much initial enthusiasm followed by criticism as Eucalyptus globulus .
Starting in the late 1820s, settlers planted the species across all of southern Africa.
The species was so widely planted in the nineteenth century that, despite not being
planted for most of the twentieth century, many South Africans still call any species
of Eucalyptus a 'blue gum' or 'bloekomboom'. The species grows best in a narrow
climatic range similar to its cooler native habitats in New South Wales, Victoria,
and Tasmania, but settlers planted it in deserts, on mountains, and in the subtropical
interior. Even when trees did grow, the results could not live up to the high
expectations stoked by enthusiasts. Farmers complained that their trunks twisted,
rendering timber useless except for firewood (Ogston, 1903: 216). For a time,
DeBeers did not buy them for use in the diamond mines (Farmer, 1903: 352). One
farmer, P. H. Pringle, told readers of the Agricultural Journal of the Cape of Good Hope
( AJCGH ) how he had planted numerous genera and species of exotic trees, but
found out that the 'least satisfactory of the lot is the Bluegum' (Pringle, 1903: 596).
The difficulties planters experienced with Eucalyptus globulus indicated a broader
problem that scientists and settlers alike faced when selecting Australian genera and
species of trees to plant. Rapid naturalisation under certain conditions of exotics
such as Acacia mearnsii (black wattle) in the midlands of Natal in the 1880s and
1890s, happened largely as an accident, could not always easily be replicated on
nearby sites and have historically overshadowed the widespread failure of trees
planted in the nineteenth century (Macdonald et al ., 1986: 145-155). Another
unsuccessful species was the Eucalyptus robusta , which settlers planted in the dry
western districts of the Cape Colony. The seemingly healthy trees grew for a time,
but '[t]hen came the inevitable failure. As a native of the damp semi-tropics of East
Australia it was quite out of its place in the . . . climate of the Cape Peninsula or
the dry Karoo' (Hutchins, 1905: 523). Although Eucalyptus species proved the
most difficult to select, species of Australian Acacia, Araucaria, Casuarina and Hakea
all provided problems for would-be planters in different parts of the colony.
Would-be tree planters had little advice that detailed the native climates of an exotic
species, let alone compared them with corresponding climates in the Cape Colony.
Almost all tree-planting guides before the twentieth century lacked specificity,
hindering the successful selection of species by settlers (see Storr Lister, 1884).