Off to botany: exotic species in the garden

While the trees in my garden in Frankfurt could hardly wait for spring to begin, I ended up in Nairobi for a week and a half.

From one day to the next we left the winter with its sub-zero temperatures behind us and landed in the Kenyan summer: Research for the "Baumpalaver" project (www.faz.net/wald).

We visited laboratories, parks, greenhouses and trudged through test fields, but to claim that from now on we would be able to distinguish all African acacia species at a glance would be a lie.

However, we will remember their spines and, for example, flowering

also “wait-a-bit”.

Sonya Kastilan

Editor in the "Science" department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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With exotic fruits on the branches, the assignment is easier, and how nice it would be to be able to grow avocados, mangoes or bananas for your own use at home, as is common in private gardens in Nairobi.

Kale, which seems to be indispensable throughout the country, might do much better, only I wouldn't make room in the flower bed for the skinny stems, and the vegetable attracts too few birds, apart from chickens, for my liking.

When we casually explained to the researchers what a German variety designation means in English in their “Nursery”, they were amazed: Hass, such an unappetizing name for such a coveted product?

They, in turn, got us enthusiastic about the popular "Loquats", which I initially simply meant for yellow-fruited relatives of our orange medlars,

, who like to swim in high-proof spirits in the Rhine-Main area.

However, it is not quite that simple: Although Loquat or

is also a rose family, these two genera are not particularly close in the family tree, and Southeastern Europe is one of the home areas of the medlars, which have been cultivated for around 3000 years, along with southwestern Asia for the supposedly "Japanese medlar" has only been true for about 1000 years.

In addition, in the 2020 Frontiers in Plant Science, Chinese botanists and geneticists suggested renaming the species, which originated in Asia, as

, after their analyzes of the genome, including chloroplasts, of 76 species from 32 genera of the rose family led to a redesign of the family tree.

A different kind of birdie

I read that in the shade of dense bamboo poles with a view of almost monstrously rampant

plants on the house wall opposite (with flowers that are rarely to be expected in German living rooms - they would be a case for voluntary self-control), a kite circling above me and one or the other crescent dove.

Even in a small garden, the Kenyan bird world can come up with such a splendor and variety that I found it difficult not to keep digressing from reading to some birdie, be it the ornamental sunbird or noisy ibis, for which I would not want to exchange my tits.

At some point I had to realize that "wild loquat" means another tree native to southern Africa called

, which copes well with drought and heat and is useful all around: bark, leaves and roots are traditionally used as medicinal and insect protection - or dyes, the wood as fuel, insects feed on the flowers of the spurge family.

The fruits are rich in vitamin C and are eaten raw, processed into cakes or alcoholic beverages.

It takes ten years or more from seed to first harvest, so breeders have devised tricks.

Nevertheless, a "Mkusu" is rare enough: This species is dioecious - you need them in pairs.

Spring is near!