Erythrina acanthocarpa

Erythrina acanthocarpa is a shrub known as a suffrutex, because it grows new shoots annually from a perennial underground stem or branched stems that live safely underground, annually sacrificing the above ground parts to fire and other depredations. In such a case the rootstock performs more functions than ordinary tree roots. 

The common name of this plant, the tambookie thorn comes from the Queenstown area of the Eastern Cape that used to be called Tambukiland. This is where E. acanthocarpa is endemic, i.e. it only occurs in nature in this area. 

As human population numbers increase, endemic areas of many species (plants, animals, whatever lives) come under threat of no longer suitable for sustaining what used to thrive there. Any one species that overcomes its natural enemies too well and breeds beyond the level of sustaining its ecological partners, i.e. the other things that used to live there, becomes a weed, an undesirable, a threat. Weeds tend to dominate until they have used up natural resources, then disappear themselves.

The rootstocks of dead tambookie thorn plants were used to make pith helmets long ago. Fortunately for tambookie thorn pith helmets have gone out of fashion (www.plantzafrica.com).