Did You Know we have a Champion Tree?

Did you know that there are champion trees? I don’t mean one tree species being prized above another; like I love giant bluegum trees more than I love oak trees. (But that is because I was born in the Free State, not the Western Cape. Sorry!) No, champion trees fall into categories like the tallest (Saligna Gum 81.5m, Haenertsburg) biggest (Baobab, 34m high, 21m tall, 34m crown) tallest indigenous (Monkey Thorn, 39m, Groot Marico.)  

And Solms-Delta has its own champion tree. The oldest Oak tree in South Africa.
I didn’t know this until someone asked me recently where the Solms-Delta champion tree was?  This set me wondering because I know that the farm is famous for its arboreal splendour. On one of the farm nature tours Johan O’Rian, the source of information about all living things, had shown us the grove of carob trees, thought to contain the largest specimens in South Africa. He had also introduced us to the remarkable camphor tree that has its main trunk growing horizontally for over 15 meters.

But the champion tree, identified by Prof. Brian Bredenkamp of Stellenbosch University, is the oak tree right in front of the Solms-Delta homestead. It is said to be the oldest oak tree in South Africa. About 315 years old. It was planted a few years after the first homestead on the farm (which was originally called Zandvliet) was erected, and it is still going strong. Quite a record, and getting better each passing year, although a photograph in the farm’s museum (taken in 1905) shows that the tree has barely grown any taller over the past century. It was then, as it is now, more than twice the height of the front gable of the homestead, which it guards so proudly. Do you know of any equally old oak trees? Or even more beautiful trees? Do you, like Thomas Pakenham, have a favourite tree?

John van Zyl  

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