In the shadow of glants

Eucalyptuses the colossi of our landscapeare spread out over a large part of South Africa and offer respite to man and beast and bee. Still, it's become the done thing to simply get rid of these "aliens". Please think twice about doing so, pleads Dave Pepler.

- Dave Pepler.

Ours is a country with few large trees. Here and O there, you'll find patches of montane forest, the one in Knysna being the most famous, and then you have the Lowveld with its fat baobabs and slim thorn trees - silhouettes that define the landscape. But between Knysna and the Lowveld, there are many wide-open spaces: the Karoo, the edge of the Kalahari, the red grass veld of the central Free State, the dry West Coast. In terms of trees, our country is rather bare.

Still, when I think back to my childhood in Robertson in the Boland, it's the bloekoms I remember. Yes, there were jacarandas, cypresses, Norfolk Island pines and sweet pines in my hometown, but the giants, the towers of the tree landscape, were the eucalyptuses.

There was a monumental eucalyptus at the railway station where Japie Tenbob, our traffic cop, always hid with his stopwatch, and at the Voortrekker Hall, there were the pale trunks of the row of trees by the Hoops River. At Silwerstrand there was a sparse plantation of eucalyptus where my dog Toby and I spent weekends daydreaming on the banks of the Breede River. My Oupa Boy and I used to go for walks in the veld, and he'd speak of the "bloggoms". The road to the Langeberg went past the churchyard through a eucalyptus plantation - and it was there, as a small child, that I learnt to kick bobbejaansnuif, a type of dyeball fungus that would release its spores in khaki-colored clouds. I can still hear my grandfather's voice and smell the eucalyptus oil in the warm air as if it were yesterday.