Combretum imberbe twins

Leadwood trees grow all over the Limpopo Valley, tending to favour the land near streambanks and watercourses. They are often found in brackish soils high in clay. Saplings are protected by spine-like, rigid branches growing opposite. Spike branchlets are found on young stems. The old, bare stems, pale with interlocking bark rectangles are hard, often preserved well, showing few signs of being affected by the untold elephant, people and other disruptive events around them over many years.

Erasmus (2016, p.82) calls the old leadwoods of the bushveld “the nobility in the realm of trees on earth”. These twins grew old at the Nieuwelust farm in the Limpopo Valley. They have few remaining scars, some undulations from forgotten trauma, mainly present uniform pale grey bark, evened out over the lesser mishaps of a long life. How many times have their trunks been blackened by fires raging through the grass? They survived the old South Africa, impassive in the new one.

The days when maize was still commonly ground in leadwood mortars, the hardness of the wood was recognised in the application. Making a mortar from a leadwood stump is equal to many sessions in the gym plus inordinate expenses in axes and other tools.

Ash from leadwood fires mixed with milk was used in days of yore as whitewash on the clay of hut walls, maybe providing some measure of waterproofing as well. Clay pots were also painted thus; maybe still where the practice is remembered or rediscovered. Inhaling the smoke of burnt leadwood leaves did something to (or for) chest ailments, hopefully more than making the sufferer cough (Erasmus, 2016).