The Secret Life of Trees by Colin Tudge

Author:Colin Tudge
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141927299
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2006-03-26T16:00:00+00:00

Finally, the ten species of Nyssa are mostly ornamental but include the tupelo, N. aquatica and N. sylvatica, trees big enough to provide North Americans with railway sleepers. (Once Nyssa had its own family, the Nyssaceae, but Judd subsumes it within the Cornaceae.)

Persimmons, Ebony, Chewing Gum, Tea, Heather and Brazil Nuts: ORDER ERICALES

The Ericales order includes around 9,450 species in twenty-four families, with many outstanding trees, not least in the family Ebena-ceae. All the Ebenaceae are trees or shrubs: most from all over the tropics, with just a few from more temperate zones. The major player is the genus Diospyros, with around 450 species: 200 or so in lowland Malaysia; quite a few in tropical Africa; somewhat fewer in Latin America; some in Australia and India; and a few outliers in the United States, the Mediterranean and Japan.

Diospyros includes a whole range of edible fruits, which are all highly astringent until they are fully ripe, but then are delicious. Best known are the persimmons, which look superficially like big, thick-skinned tomatoes, and are eaten fresh, cooked or candied. Most widely cultivated – especially in China and Japan, but also in California and the south of France – is D. kaki from Japan, which was introduced to the US in the late nineteenth century. Native to the US, with smaller, dark red fruits is D. virginiana. This is a tall, thin tree up to 30 metres and not much cultivated, although its fruits are often picked wild (and D. virginiana is often used as rootstock for D. kaki). The date plum, D. lotus, is grown in Italy and the Far East. D. digyna is the black sapote. Not all the Diospyros fruits are particularly friendly, however: the crushed seeds of some Malaysian and Indonesian species are used to poison fish.

Diospyros also includes various extremely valuable timbers of the kind known as ebony. The trees are not huge – generally around 15–18 metres tall, with trunks around 60 centimetres thick – and so the timber is sold only in short lengths. But the heartwood of some species is jet black, and others are deep rich brown or alluringly striped in brown or black. For their fine colour, strength and prodigious weight, – far heavier than water – the ebonies have been valued since ancient times. The pharaohs had their glossy black furniture made from ebony. It is excellent both for sculpture and for turning – door knobs, the butts of billiard cues, chess pieces – and marquetry, piano and organ keys, clarinets, and the chanters of bagpipes.

Various species are harvested in Africa, where ebonies can be important forest trees, including the very dark D. crassiflora. D. reticulata from Mauritius is highly prized. D. ebenum from Sri Lanka is known as Ceylon ebony and is often called ‘true ebony’ because its timber is a uniform jet black. D. marmorata from the Andaman islands is a small tree (only about 6 metres) but it yields a fabulous brown-black mottled timber known as Andaman marblewood.

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