My relationship with trees goes back to childhood.
When I was growing up, we didn’t have tree houses, but I would take my Nancy Drew books and go sit in a grove of blue gum trees that created a tent around me. There, through the leaves, I managed to avoid a lot of household chores, and I even lost a few books in those trees.
The blue gum trees were welcome sources of solace and fantasy to the pre-teen me. I built many castles in the air, and created weird and wonderful worlds while huddled safely within those leaves.
To this day the eucalyptus smell of blue gum trees transports me back there. Having just celebrated Heritage Month and Arbor Month in September, I was again reminded how lucky I am to live in a neighbourhood in the southern suburbs with many large, mature trees. Our bit of urban forest is one of my community’s greatest assets, if you ask me.
It’s not often that one gets to see a city through the narrative of trees – after all, we think of a city as buildings, people, streets, cars and bustle. But, as I learnt in a presentation by Russell Galt from the South African National Biodiversity Institute, not only are there trees in Cape Town that are older than our oldest buildings, but even the more recently planted indigenous trees have many stories from our history to share.
For instance, the Treaty Tree in Woodstock is a milkwood tree that is well over 500 years old and has really seen it all. In 1510 it was witness to a Khoekhoe tribe wiping out a band of Portuguese explorers after they had raided their cattle. Later it became known as the Old Slave Tree where slaves were traded and convicts were hung – pretty gruesome.
Finally it earned its Treaty Tree name when the British forces beat the Dutch and signed the peace treaty in the adjacent Treaty House in 1806. The house was destroyed in 1935 to make way for a factory, but the tree still stands – gnarled and bent from many centuries worth of wind, but still showing off lush green foliage. It was declared a national monument in 1967 and even has a wine named after it.
“If trees can be likened to people, then ‘heritage trees’ are the characters with the strongest personalities,” said Russell, drawing inspiration for his definition from the book Heritage Trees of Scotland. “Those which by virtue of their extraordinary appearance, age, cultural symbolism or historical significance most readily capture our imaginations.”
One tree that particularly captured my imagination was the saffron pear tree in the Company’s Garden. It’s about 350 years old, presumed to have been planted by Jan van Riebeeck. The main trunk has died, but four of its branches have been re-rooted and the tree is held together by metal crutches and cables. The most incredible thing is that every spring it still blossoms and every autumn it produces fruit. Imagine eating fruit from the same tree as Jan van Riebeeck himself!
Another tree that goes back to precolonial times is the “Unabantu Nokuphila” – or the All-loving One Where Healing Flows – tree. Planted over 400 years ago, this special wild fig tree marked the borderline of the Camissa-fed Weltevreden dam of Cape Town, where residents and visitors from afar would gather to collect their fresh water and socialise under the shade.
The tree has specific spiritual significance and today it continues to receive and refresh friends and visitors, supporting and inspiring its Ubuntu Wellness Centre custodians at the Cape Town Medi-Spa just off Kloof Street.
Cape Town is one of the few cities in the world that is situated within a national park. The abundance of trees and forests in the Table Mountain National Park contributes greatly to our city’s liveability index. The majority of our city’s residences are, however, deprived of the benefits of trees and forests in their immediate neighbourhoods, which is why the work of organisations like Green Pop is so important.
What’s more, I was astounded by the actual economic contribution of trees when I read a study by the UN Environment Programme that advocates planting trees and increasing topsoil as preferable methods of combating global climate change. Cities world-wide are recognising and measuring the value of their existing trees and have extensive programmes to plant new trees.
The New York City Parks Department determined that the 600 000 street trees in its five boroughs provide an annual benefit of $122 million – more than five times the cost of maintaining them. A similar exercise in London showed that trees store about 1.5 million tons of carbon valued at £16.32m. In addition, London’s trees remove over 40 000 tons of carbon each year.
I cannot write about the values of trees without mentioning the enormous contribution of the Tree Mother of Africa and her Green Belt Movement. By the early 1970s, Wangari Muta Maathai had witnessed the devastating large-scale effects of the Kenyan government’s deforestation efforts.
By transfiguring forests into land for agricultural and residential uses, the government deforestation programme exacerbated Kenya’s environmental degeneration, leading to severe droughts, soil erosion and the conversion of farmland into arid desert-like soil. There were also no concerted efforts to plant trees in cities – in fact, much of rural and urban Kenya started to resemble a desert.
This deprived numerous communities of the resources they needed to survive. Kenyan women, whose traditional role has always been to find firewood and water, were significantly affected by the devastation of these natural resources. As a result, Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, a grassroots environmental non-governmental organisation, on Earth Day in 1977.
With the founding of the Green Belt Movement, Maathai launched a life-long crusade to put a stop to Kenya’s environmental catastrophe and its related violation of the right of all people to live healthy and sustainable lives.
Maathai’s work inspired women in Kenya, across Africa and indeed beyond the African borders, to view environmental health as an indisputable human right, rather than a privilege that could be denied. In December 2002, Maathai was elected to Kenya’s parliament with an astonishing 98 percent majority vote.
Then-president Mwai Kibaki appointed Maathai as assistant minister for the environment. Two years later she was awarded the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize “for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace”.
Trees and sustainable development are interlinked with the environmental, economic and social health of a city. The Cape Town Partnership has chosen the word “resilience” as an umbrella term for the planning and design strategies needed to help Cape Town develop the necessary capacity to meet the challenges of the future.
These include energy efficiency and climate change, food security, transport connectivity, and social and economic cohesion.
A resilient city is one that has developed capacities to absorb future shocks and stresses to its social, economic and technical systems and infrastructures so as to still be able to maintain essentially the same functions, structures, systems and identity.
The Cape Town Partnership has taken on this challenge through many of its programmes, especially the Low-Carbon Central City Strategy and Green Clusters.
The Low-Carbon Central City Strategy is a research collaboration between ourselves, local climate change NGO Sustainable Energy Africa and the City of Cape Town municipal government.
Working together, we synthesised new sources of climate data for Cape Town’s Central City area and made various future carbon emissions scenarios based on a specific set of potential interventions.
Our Green Clusters initiative aims to foster collaborative dialogue with all the many partner organisations and individuals who believe there is an urgent need to embrace urban agriculture on a citywide scale – from town to township, and across socio-economic divides.
Our first research document, in collaboration with the Oranjezicht City Farm, and compiled by renowned science writer Leonie Joubert, is currently being prepared for publication.
I strongly believe that trees are not an optional extra – they deserve to be at the heart of policies for health, economic regeneration, environmental protection, nature conservation, education and community development of Cape Town.
If more people demanded the benefits that can come from healthy trees in their neighbourhoods then the policymakers and professional practitioners would be much more likely to find new ways of interlacing urban forests into the heart of their activities.
We need to take the urban forest much more seriously and plant the trees and woodlands that will grow to form our legacy for the people in the Cape Town of the next century.
l Makalima-Ngewana is chief executive of the Cape Town Partnership.