Name-dropping

During walks in the Berg and the KwaZuluNatal midlands I have acquired an elementary knowledge of the commoner trees and plants. I have this habit of pointing out the White Stinkwood and then in an understated English way, almost sotto voce, that its botanical name is Celtis africana. I then proceed to the Paperback Thorn tree and, with a casualness that implies even deeper and more extensive knowledge of a whole panoply of the earth's vegetation, that its scientific name is Acacia sieberiana.

The family feel it is rather a pathetic way of gaining some recognition. They can all repeat the litany of my limited ecoknowledge as we walk around the garden. Things don't stop here. My audience, having realised that they are in the presence of a world authority, start to ask questions and request identification of trees, whose names I haven't a clue. I then fall back on what I would call my poetic imaginative powers but what the family call, rather hurtfully, I feel, talking bull.

I make up names as I go along or apply names from my repertoire, which have a kind of impressive cadence to them, such as Ficus elastica decora. It just rolls sonorously off the tongue. To reveal that it is the name of the common rubber plant is not the same. I try to deliver this knowledge with a hint of condescension, the very obviousness of it all, to forestall further inquiries. If really stuck, I retreat to Aborescens vulgaris natalensis and Gluteus maximus.

Recently I have acquired a new name for my collection. We have a small woodland garden which slopes down to a rivulet, which I am informed goes by the rather twee name of the Teddy Bear Creek. In this garden is a large indigenous tree which I have been trying to identify for some time. I took a flowering branch to that splendid man at the Val-Lea Vista Nursery in Lincoln Meade. He identified it as Clerodendron glabrum. Can you imagine my excitement at hearing such a name?

I have had to practise how to say it a few times but now guests are steered towards it. I then in a by-the-way sort of an aside mention that it is Clerodrendron glabrum but, of course, that one sees so often in these woodland areas.

It is, in fact, one of the "Rain" trees so named because it "rains" for about a week or more in the last days of the dry winter months just before the proper breaking of the rains. The rain is caused by the nymph of a small insect called a frog-hopper, known in scientific circles as Ptyelus grossus (almost whispered as an afterthought). It pierces the bark with its stylet, sucks up the sap at great speed and then ejects it almost as pure water. This then drips from the tree.

We have a bench under the tree and, of an evening, friends are known to join us for a drink. As the Pimms Number One with the tropical fruit and the umbrella are being served, I envisage a drop falling on a guest's head. I shall look up to the sky and comment that the rains appear to be early this year. One would not want to disturb the ambience of the occasion by describing what exactly is happening.

·  Chris Ellis is author of Despatches from the Last Outpost, which has just been reprinted.
Publish Date: 27 February 2002