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Mary Mackel - Soundscape

Mary,

It's not exactly Mediterranean but you have to include Hura crepitans
(Euphorbiaceae) a large evergreen tree from tropical South America.  H.
crepitans grows into a large tree in its native lands reaching 20 metres or
so.  The trunk bears stout, persistent, emergent prickles.  

H. crepitans bears a segmented fruit with up to about 20 locules resembling
a peeled tangerine.  When the fruit is fully ripe it dehisces explosively
scattering seed more than 10 metres.  Actually, the fruit goes off with one
hell of a bang and if it happens to be in your living room at the time, and
months after you've acquired the thing, it is a truly cardiac experience.  

The sound of the exploding fruits has led to the common names applied to
the tree in the West Indies of Monkey's Dinner Bell or Monkey's Dinner
Gong.  It is also known as the Sand-box Tree because the fruits (suitably
de-fused by being boiled in oil or bound with wire) were used as
receptacles for sand in the days before blotting paper.  The fruits were
also sometimes filled with lead to make paperweights.

In SE Asia H. crepitans is used occasionally as a street tree having been
introduced there just before the turn of the century.  The trees I've seen
in SE Asia are characteristically umbrella-shaped but have all been rather
squat and seem unlikely to reach the size they do in the Caribbean. 
Although it is attractive enough I would not recommend H. crepitans as a
street tree because of its latex.  The latex is highly irritant and can
blister the skin (photosensitisation, I think) and cause blindness in
contact with the eyes.  The latex, used as a fish poison in South America,
is also used to make a huratoxin arrow poison which is 500,000 times more
toxic than potassium cyanide.  The active ingredient hurin is chemically
related to the infamous ricin and to crotin.

The leaves od H. crepitans have various folk medicinal uses in the
Caribbean against swellings, boils and rheumatic pain.  An aqueous infusion
of the seed minus embryos is said to be an infallible aperient but with
embryos it is a violent purgative.  Some of the Caribbean folk medicine
knowledge appears to have reached Java at least where the seeds were used
sometimes as a purgative but mainly the latex was used (ineffectively)
against leprosy.  


Finally, and on a purely pedantic note, Mary, you cannot re-invent yourself
as a horticulturalist because there is no such beast.  You can, however, be
a horticulturist or, somewhat more obscurely, a horticultor.

Good luck in the fires.

David Constantine

drc@globalnet.co.uk
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