A site-by-site guide to trees in the Kruger National Park, by Marissa Greeff

A site-by-site guide to trees in the Kruger National Park, by Marissa Greeff. Briza Publications. Pretoria, South Africa 2013. ISBN 9780621418088 / ISBN 978-0-621-41808-8

Although the book is about trees, Marissa Greeff has compiled it around placed in the Kruger Park. It is not a field guide, but is aimed at the visitor who may have noticed a tree and wondered, "What tree is that?"

Marissa Greeff  

Marissa Greeff's book is about the trees of the Kruger National Park. However, it is not afield guide, nor is it a photographic guide and it is definitely not a botanical guide. The book is aimed at the ordinary Kruger Park visitor who may have noticed a tree for the first time and wondered, "What tree is that?" That tree may be one of those in a prominent spot in a rest camp, at a picnic site or bird hide, and may feature in this book - such as the tambotis at Afsaal Picnic Site. This book is about the conspicuous and the less conspicuous trees that we ordinary visitors spot when travelling through the Kruger Park. The giants of the Kruger Park are included - the baobab, jackal-berry, nyala tree, common cluster fig and marula. The graceful ones such as the white kirkia and weeping boerbean are here, as well as the eccentrics like the fever tree and the shepherd's tree. There are many trees worth looking at in the Kruger Park, especially on the banks of the big and beautiful rivers, the Crocodile, the Sabie, the Shing-wedzi, the Letaba, the Olifants, the list goes on as one travels further north. Once the trees of the N'waswitsontso River at Tshokwane and along the Timbavati River start to intrigue you, and you notice the old giants in the ancient forest on the Mphongolo River near Babalala, then the time has come to buy a real field guide. And there are many of those. Enjoy your visit to the Kruger Park and may you, like my family and me, notice trees in many places, be intrigued and become interested.

Tamboti; Tambotie; Spirostachys africana

Afsaal Picnic Site: Breakfast among Afsaal's tambotis

Afsaal, meaning "unsaddle", is the busiest and most popular of the Kruger Park picnic sites. Due to the seemingly never-ending stream of visitors, Afsaal has assumed the nature of the trading post that the shop's name and architecture suggests. The only ones who seem unperturbed and undisturbed by all the bustle and noise, are the scops owls and the tamboti trees. Afsaal is a picnic site near the intersection of the Old Voortrekker Road (H2-2) and the H3, the tarred road from Malelane to Skukuza, 22 km north from the Malelane Gate. The Old Voortrekker Road still roughly follows the route that the transport wagons used between the goldfields of the old Eastern Transvaal (Mpumalanga) and Delagoa Bay (now Maputo in Mocambique) between 1870 and 1895. Sir Percy Fitzpatrick immortalised this era and the ox-wagon transport business along these routes in his well-loved book Jock of the Bushveld. Landmarks connected with the famous dog, Jock, are still found along this route. Afsaal's resident scops owls in the tamboti trees have become an attraction all of their own. It is the first thing most visitors do; they spot a scops owl in a tamboti and take a photograph. Afsaal is situated in a dense stand of tambotis. All the young trees with straight, upright, bare trunks in Afsaal are tambotis. Near the entrance to the shop, on the right on your way in, is a clump of medium-sized tambotis. Tambotis are not amongst the tree giants of the Kruger Park. They are slow growers that reach up to 10 m in height, but they develop spectacularly thick trunks.  [...]

This is an excerpt from the book:  A site-by-site guide to trees in the Kruger National Park, by Marissa Greeff.

Title: A site-by-site guide to trees in the Kruger National Park
Author: Marissa Greeff
Publisher: Briza Publications
Pretoria, South Africa 2013
ISBN 9780621418088 / ISBN 978-0-621-41808-8
Softcover, 21 x 21 cm, 156 pages, throughout colour photographs