Sideroxylon inerme fruit

Sideroxylon inerme or the white milkwood tree is a shrub or small tree that may, however, sometimes reach 10 m in height (SA Tree List No. 579).

This is one of the respected woody inhabitants of many special places of natural beauty from Cape Town along the coast up to Mozambique. Coates Palgrave mentions three specimens that are national monuments: the Post Office Tree at Mossel Bay dating from 1500, the Treaty Tree in Woodstock where control of the Cape was given to the English by the Dutch in 1806 and the Fingo Milkwood Tree near Peddie, where the Fingo tribe accepted British protection in 1835. The South African range extends inland to the Mpumalanga and Limpopo Lowveld.

The fruits of the tree are fleshy, spherical and the dense clusters will all turn purplish black when they are ripe, before or by January.

The habitat is coastal forest and woodland, sometimes forming thickets on its own. The species is not considered to be threatened in its habitat early in the twenty first century (Coates Palgrave, 2002; http://redlist.sanbi.org).