Tree Removal For...Sociopolitical Reasons

AP's Gillian Gotora writes about the tree removal and replanting program at Royal Harare Golf Club in Zimbabwe, where indigenous tall woody plants will take priority over non-natives. It seems the "foreign" trees — firs, pines and eucalyptus — were planted by early white settlers to remind them of their distant origins are now being rooted out.

The move to go indigenous for all of the usual reasons is in play--water savings, tree health, aesthetics--but there is that other reason too...

According to records, the early, mainly British, settlers were filled with nostalgia for their home regions and golf gave them solace. They planted imported trees and shrubs in Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was known before independence in 1980.

King George V, grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II, played on the course in 1929, bestowing the royal title on the club. But the last of the hardy, long-living foreign trees he saw are being cut down now. The first settlers felled the indigenous trees on the course and wild animals that once roamed there disappeared too.

Royal Harare club manager Ian Mathieson said a program to cut down "alien" trees and replant trees "indigenous" to Zimbabwe such as the acacia and msasa varieties is under way, and will take 20 years to complete. So far, nearly 60 gnarled and elderly "foreign" trees have been removed and more than 300 local trees and shrubs have been planted in their place.