Description
This is a fast-growing shade tree with soft foliage, best suited to gardens and streets in the warmer and wetter regions of southern Africa. Depending on climatic conditions, trees may be evergreen or deciduous. It’s a good shade tree or street tree although not as tough and cold-hardy as Celtis africana (white stinkwood). In forests it is a straight, slender tree, up to 18 m on forest margins, and in the open it is wider-spreading, sometimes drooping, and in the KwaZulu-Natal bushveld it often grows as a shrub approx. 1.5 m tall. The less water it receives, the shorter it is. Flowers are small, inconspicuous and greenish, carried in short dense bunches. They are usually unisexual, i.e. male and female are separate, occasionally they are found together. Flowers appear irregularly from late winter to autumn and are pollinated by bees. Fruits are small, round and green, becoming black when ripe. They are eaten by birds like the Lesser Striped swallows, white-eyes, canaries and bats. The leaves are carried on very short stalks-this is the easiest way to tell this tree apart from the White Stinkwood whose stalks are up to 13 mm long. The leaves are browsed by kudu. The young leaves are eaten as spinach by the Zulus, who also use the roots and bark as traditional medicine. Fruit, leaves, bark, stems, twigs and seeds are used in traditional medicine in West Africa, Tanzania, East Africa and Madagascar.It is a food plant of several charaxes butterflies. The wood is used as box wood and the roots bind the soil. The name is derived from the Greek trema=aperture. hole, opening. The kernel of the fruit is pitted.