A giant once lived in Kloof

By John Beauchamp

I grew up in old Kloof. And like so many of Kloof’s younger population, went to Kloof Junior School, now the pre-primary school next to Field’s Centre. At that time Miss Bosman (no relation to the more famous Herman Charles) was our teacher.

My inseparable friend at the time was a boy called Ben, a red-headed rascal with a great sense of adventure. Ben and I, both aged ten, were particularly interested in big trees. We roamed Kloof on our bicycles looking for the biggest tree. We had no doubt that our adult careers would involve trees, especially big trees – perhaps we would be lumberjacks. That was our big fantasy.

Down at the far end of Beryldene Road, well past the guest-house that is now Tina’s Hotel, we found the biggest tree in Kloof – a magnificent Eucalyptus Grandis or gum tree as they are also known. At knee height it had a circumference of over 30 feet. We studied Ben’s out-of-date Guinness Book of Records to see whether it was the biggest in the world. No! It was not; the world’s biggest tree was in North America. A Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum), known as the General Sherman.

This gave us an idea: it would be cool to grow our own giant Sequoia in Kloof. So with the help of his parents, Ben wrote to the Canadian Government’s Department of Forestry and asked for information and some seeds. To our great surprise, a couple of months later a letter arrived from Canada containing some seeds and photocopies of information on the cultivar, and detailed instructions on how to grow the seeds.

We followed the planting instructions carefully: first putting stones on a shallow pot for drainage and then filling it with potting medium. Ben’s father bought two bags of the required fertilizer, some of which was mixed in with the potting medium. The rest Ben’s mother gratefully appropriated for her outstanding Agapanthus garden.

The instructions said that we should water the seedling gently as too much would rot it’s roots. So we wet the area surface of our pot of growing medium lightly and pushed the seeds down into their bed with our fingers. Thereafter, whenever the surface of the pot was bone dry, Ben gave the little seedlings a little more water.

We transplanted the largest of our now robust seedlings to a carefully selected, shady part of the garden near a majestic Flat-crown. Ben’s father had built a tree-house in the Flat-crown and from there we could monitor the progress of our giant, which was slow. The first thing we learnt was that trees, even giant Sequoia don’t grow when you watch them (rather like Boyl’s law that we learned in physics: Watt’s Pots Never Boil. Within a few months OUR tree was a sturdy plant about knee high.

One of the things we had been told was that the sequoia could, like the camphor tree, spread quite rapidly.

Several years passed, and after Kloof Junior School, I went to Highbury, a school in Hillcrest, and travelled to school each morning from Kloof in the steam train which in those days travelled regularly along the highway line. Every morning on the train I would look anxiously towards the west of old Kloof to see whether the Sequoia forest had materialised. I spoke to a farmer friend of my father who said I would have to wait until the tree is mature before it would multiply. “Like you, my boy”, he added with a dodgy chuckle.

One day, several months ago I drove around the vicinity of Ben’s house to see whether I could spot the tree we had planted. I had no luck, so I went to the house where he had lived and knocked on the front door. A kindly looking woman about my mother’s age answered and I told her my story. She told me that she and her husband had bought the house from Ben’s parents several years before. She asked me to show her exactly where the tree had been growing. I took her to the spot near the flat-crown. There were strange children in the tree-house.

“I remember”, she said. “There was a big tree growing there. It blocked the view from our bedroom window so we had to have it chopped down.”

“But,” I said, “surely the view of this tree would also have been something special.”

I know that was quite rude of me but I was disappointed and angry; so many wonderful trees have had to make way for one sort of development or another in Kloof, for the questionable convenience of humans. Trees are important. Every tree I have ever planted will say far more about me than anything written on my tombstone once I am dead, even those that do not outlive me. After all, we plant trees for posterity. So we expect them to last longer than we do. When they go before us, it is a shock.

About the author

John Beauchamp was born in 1943 and spent most of his childhood in Kloof. He attended school in both Kloof and Hillcrest. “The house that my father build was situated on land which now joins Kloof High School, which at that time was taken up by the paddocks that we kept our horses in.”