The Tree (5 page)

To see how hard life can be for botanists in tropical forests, we have only to look at the wondrous Reserva Florestal Adolfo Ducke (which rhymes roughly with “booker”): forty square miles of pristine forest in northern Brazil, about a thousand miles up the Amazon River, just outside Manaus. The Ducke Reserve has been studied intensively for decades. Sir Ghillean Prance, formerly director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, has been working there on and off since 1965. When he first arrived, the total species list of ferns and flowering plants that had by then been identified stood at a little over 1,000, of which about 60 percent were trees. He and the other resident and visiting botanists steadily added to the species list, and by 1993 it ran to 1,200. A high proportion of their additions were orchids.

The botanists aimed from the outset to produce a key to the native plants, but, says Professor Prance, “all of us got diverted,” and they never got around to it. Eventually, in the early 1990s, helped by the National Research Institute of the Amazon (INPA) and a grant from the British government, botanists were recruited specifically to provide the much-needed flora guide. Mike Hopkins was appointed as one of the two coordinators. In truth, he was not a botanist but an insect specialist (an entomologist) from Wales (via Oxford). He pointed out to the appointments board that the guide was intended to be read and used by all who were interested—and if it was prepared by botanists, he argued, only botanists would be able to follow it. “But if I can understand it,” he said, “then anybody can.” Ghillean Prance supported his case, and Hopkins got the job. A succession of Brazilian scientists have also acted as coordinators.

It took five years of focused study to produce the guide—and that five years more than doubled the species list that first confronted Ghillean Prance in the mid-1960s. The total inventory now stands at 2,200, of which about 1,300 are trees. Not all of the additions are new to science, of course. But some of them are (including more orchids). From all this, three points are abundantly clear. First, identification really can be difficult—for it had taken decades to produce the species list of 1965 that included only half the species in the Ducke Reserve. Second, in the tropics at least, the more that botanists look, the more they find. Third, the tropics really are extraordinarily diverse. Thus the Ducke Reserve is about a hundred thousand times smaller than the United States (which is nearly 3.7 million square miles) yet harbors nearly twice as many kinds of native trees.

Anyway, in 1999 the team that Dr. Hopkins coordinated finally produced the
Flora da Reserva Ducke,
a magnificent work that drips with color photographs and diagrams of everything pertinent, and allows identification not simply from the flowers and fruits that are commonly taken to be definitive but are usually absent but also from the leaves, twigs, and all-important bark. The guide would be among my favorite reading, if only it wasn’t in Portuguese.

Practical, hardheaded forestry of the kind that supports economies and ultimately supports the whole world depends on such fine-tuned botany. If foresters don’t know what’s what, they can wind up making horrible mistakes. It is still necessary to harvest at least some trees from the wild, and possibly always will be. In temperate countries where the trees in any one forest tend to be of less than half a dozen species (and sometimes only one) it is easy, at least conceptually, to take a proportion without doing terminal damage. But when the forest contains hundreds of species and no two next to each other are alike, problems abound. Some tropical trees provide timber of immense value—worth several thousand dollars a cubic meter. Some that may look very similar to the valuable species from the ground may be good for nothing but firewood—and yet may be immensely important to the other creatures of the forest. Make a mistake, and you waste time and effort and do damage for no reason. When valuable trees are harvested, it is important not to take too many and, in particular, to leave “mother trees” that will seed the next generation. The sad loss of mahogany from the West Indies over the past two centuries is just one example of many of what happens when foresters are careless. Often, though, we find that the target species has relatives that are very similar (and may indeed provide timber that is just as good) but are much rarer. If the forester is careless about identification, he (tropical foresters are usually “he”) may harvest the rare, related species alongside the main target species—and so may wipe out the rare one altogether, again with immense and unnecessary ecological damage. Of course, much of the logging in the tropics is still carried out illegally (even in Brazil, where the forest is as well managed as in most places, an estimated 60 percent of all logging is carried out illegally), and illegal loggers generally don’t give a damn. But the trend to sustainable harvesting is increasing—and absolutely depends on good identification.

The Amazonian tree known as the angelim, much valued for its fine, strong timber, shows that good identification and careful harvesting are not yet the norm. The angelim is a legume, one of the vast family formerly known as Leguminosae and now called Fabaceae, which includes the acacias and laburnums among trees, and gorse, peas, beans, and clover among nontrees. But what exactly is an “angelim”? At EMBRAPA, Mike Hopkins has found that foresters apply this hallowed name to well over a dozen different species from at least seven genera. Admittedly, all the commonest “angelims” come from the right family (Fabaceae), but still they come from more than one subfamily from within the Fabaceae.
¹
Similarly, the excellent timber that is marketed under the general name of “taurai” commonly includes at least five species (and probably many more) from the Brazil nut family, Lecythidaceae. Perhaps the most notorious confusion of all—much of it deliberate obfuscation—surrounds mahogany. The term should refer to one or at best several species of the genus
Swietenia,
in the family Meliaceae. In reality an enormous variety of brownish timbers are marketed as “mahogany.”

Whatever is identified must also be named. Names are an aide-mémoire, but more than that they are vital for precise communication. After God had expelled Adam from the Garden of Eden, so Genesis tells us, he created the Tower of Babel. Perhaps that was where the trouble began: in any case, naming has always been, and remains, a huge bugbear.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Different people speak different languages, of course; in aboriginal societies there is commonly one language per tribe, and the world as a whole has many thousands. Since particular species of trees may be widespread, many wind up with a hundred or more different local names—to which travelers, notably Europeans, have been wont to add a few more of their own. For those who simply want to know about trees and enjoy them—aspiring connoisseurs—this can make life very difficult; although for those who enjoy words qua words, the variety is also most intriguing.

Local names to those who understand their roots are instructive: they reflect what the tree means to the people who coined them. Some gave rise to their common English equivalents. The toon tree is
tun
in Hindi and Bengali. The sacred fig known as the peepul is
pipala
in Sanskrit—and is also known in English as the bo or bodhi, apparently from the Burmese
nyaung bawdi.
“Tamarind” comes from the Arabic
tamr-hindi,
meaning “date of India.” Neem is from the Bengali
nim
or the Hindi
nim balnimb.
Teak is
tek
in Tamil. Some local names have simply been adopted straight into English—including, in recent years, the Maori names of native conifers: totara, rimu, miro, matai, kahikatea (which is the tallest tree in New Zealand), and kauri (the most massive New Zealander).

But although local names often mean a great deal to the people who coined and use them, they can be of much less use to outsiders. It may be, for instance, that the Maoris recognize some deep similarity, practical or spiritual or whatever, between, say, the kahikatea and the kotukututu, yet see no worthwhile parallel between the kahikatea and the rimu. Certainly, at least to the foreigner, “kahikatea” sounds similar to “kotukututu,” while “rimu” is altogether different. You could not guess, as an outsider, that the kotukututu is the tree fuchsia,
Fuchsia excorticata—
the only fuchsia that still has the form of a (very lovely) tree; and that the kahikatea and rimu are both tall conifers in the same botanical family, the Podocarpaceae. It may be that by not speaking Maori, outsiders miss a great deal that is instructive. But it is at least possible that many local names in Maori and a thousand other languages are not meant to express particular relationships at all. After all, traditional societies—or at least the specialists within them—typically know their local flora and fauna as well as the rest of us know our friends and family. When you know everyone individually, you do not need to name them in ways that express particular relationships. Bill is Bill and Sarah is Sarah and Romesh is Romesh. Why should their names express more than who they are?

Some societies, however, including many European ones this past few thousand years, have tended to travel the world and have actively sought to find relationships between whatever they came across. I really do not know when such a way of thinking first arose, but Aristotle’s pupil and colleague Theophrastus refers to different kinds of oaks, growing in different places. Even Britain, with its paltry inventory of native trees, has two distinct native oaks: the common oak,
Quercus robur,
and the sessile oak
Quercus petraea.
(“Sessile” means “sitting” and refers to the way the cups of the acorn sit directly on the twig; they don’t have a stalk of their own as in common oak.) As European botanists began to travel the world, from the sixteenth century onward but particularly from the eighteenth, they found more and more oaks throughout Europe, Asia, and North America—and up to now have listed a somewhat astonishing 450 different species of oak, including both the deciduous kinds and a host of evergreen types (for example, the cork oak,
Quercus suber,
and the holm oak,
Quercus ilex
). Although, as we will shortly see, many nonoaks are also casually called “oak,” in general the term expresses a true biological relationship in a way that is not always evident in local languages. It’s not that some languages are superior to others. It’s just that different languages serve different purposes. They have different agendas. They express what different people feel is important.

But English and other such global languages raise problems of their own. English names have been conferred by many different groups of people with different traditions and for different purposes: by local people everywhere, and by gardeners, nurserymen, naturalists, foresters, traders, carpenters, makers of pulpits and pianos, and even, in recent years, marketing people. Thus the same tree and its timber may have several different English names (which are often different too in English and American); and also—which can be especially damaging—many different trees may wind up with the same name. It’s as if the word “dog” was also applied, as the mood took, to horses or ants or goldfish; and goldfish were sometimes called “butterfly” or “baboon.”

(Please skip the next four paragraphs if you have no wish to be confused; they are written to illustrate the prevailing confusion.) Thus, the various trees that are peremptorily called “tulip trees” include
Liriodendron tulipifera,
from the magnolia family, Magnoliaceae; and
Spathodea campanulata
of Africa, which is from the catalpa family, Bignoniaceae. But Brazilian tulipwood is
Dalbergia frutescens—
a member of the Fabaceae (alias Leguminosae), the family of peas and acacias. On the other hand,
Dalbergia
is best known for various species of “rosewood,” though of course these have nothing to do with roses, which are in the family Rosaceae. Almonds and plums do belong to the Rosaceae. But the “wild almond” of India is
Sterculia foetida,
a relative of cacao in the Sterculiaceae family (now included in the Malvaceae); and the Java plum is
Syzygium cumini,
in the eucalyptus family, Myrtaceae.

Australians—or, rather, the British who first colonized Australia—seem to specialize in confusion. Thus true oaks belong to the genus
Quercus,
in the family Fagaceae. But the Tasmanian oak is a eucalypt,
Eucalyptus delegatensis,
in the family Myrtaceae; and the silk oak is
Grevillea robusta,
one of the Proteaceae. The genus
Flindersia
belongs to the family of oranges and lemons, Rutaceae. But various species of
Flindersia
are known as “Queensland maple” (although true maples belong to the Aceraceae); and
Flindersia schottiana
is known as southern silver ash (although true ashes are related to olives, in the family Oleaceae). On the other hand, Australia’s “mountain ash”—the world’s tallest broad-leaved tree—is another eucalypt. The European “mountain ash,” better known as the rowan, is
Sorbus aucuparia,
a member of the Rosaceae. Hmm.

But the populist namers of trees saved their full powers of obfuscation for the conifers. It’s good to acknowledge that members of the Pinaceae family have important characters in common, and to call them all “pines.” But foresters and timber traders in particular have applied the term “pine” to just about anything that has needly leaves and is evergreen. Thus, while the Pinaceae predominates among the northern conifers, the two great families of the southern continents are the Podocarpaceae and the Araucariaceae. The Podocarpaceae includes the New Zealand conifers: the kahikatea, the matai, the miro, the rimu. But the pioneer British foresters called the kahikatea the white pine, the matai the black pine, the miro the brown pine, and the rimu the red pine. The Araucariaceae includes three genera:
Agathis, Araucaria,
and
Wollemia. Agathis australis,
the kauri, is still widely known as the kauri pine. The parana pine, much favored by do-it-yourselfers, is
Araucaria angustifolia
from Argentina and surrounding areas.
Araucaria heterophylla
is commonly called the Norfolk Island pine. (
Araucaria araucana
is the monkey puzzle tree, from Chile and Argentina.) Even
Wollemia,
long thought to be extinct and only recently rediscovered in New South Wales, was immediately called the “Wollemi pine,” although in modern times we should know better. On the other hand, the Scotch pine,
Pinus sylvestris,
which really is a pine, is sometimes known in the trade as redwood; although the trees more commonly known as “redwoods” are the Californian giants of the genus
Sequoia,
which is now included in the cypress family, the Cupressaceae. Then again, the tree that Californians more commonly call the “giant sequoia” is of the related genus
Sequoiadendron
(formerly sometimes known as
Wellingtonia
). Color is a particular obsession of the timber trade. Trees called “blackwood” come from at least three families: the ebonies, Ebenaceae; the Fabaceae; and the mahogany family, Meliaceae. I won’t even begin to bore you with the number of species and their timbers known as “whitewood.”