| DESCRIPTION: It is a tall evergreen tree with scaly, pale green or brown bark. Leaves alternate, simple, dotted with glands, blade oblong-lanceolate, elliptic or oblong-elliptic, 3-15 x 1.4-5 cm. Fruit a berry, at 1st green and ellipsoidal, later subspherical and turning purplish, 3-5 cm in diameter, skin leathery, glandular. Seeds 2 or more with oily endosperm, compressed, more or less cordate, yellow-brown, 1-1.5 cm long. USE: Fruit ediblem all parts have a hot peppery taste. The leaves and seeds are sometimes used to add flavour to curries. Leaves, pods and seeds are fed to livestock. It makes good timber for building and furniture, also used as firewood. The heartwood contains sesquiterpenoids that can be used against armyworms widely occurring African crop pests. Dried bark is commonly used as a remedy for stomach-ache, constipation, toothache, cough, fever, muscle pains, weak joints and general body pains. Fresh roots are boiled and mixed with soup for the prevention of diarrhoea. Bathing with a leaf decoction is used as a cure for several unspecified skin diseases. The inner bark is reddish, bitter and peppery and has a variety of applications. It provides treatment for the common cold; dried and ground to a snuff it is used to clear sinuses; and it is chewed, or smoke from the burning bark inhaled, as a remedy for chest complaints. The bark, roots or leaves can be boiled in water and the decoction drunk to treat malaria, but this causes violent vomiting. It is a good shade tree and is used as an ornamental. Fallen leaves provide green manure and mulch. GROWING PERIOD: Perennial. COMMON NAMES: Pepper-bark tree. FURTHER INF: It occurs in lowland rainforest, upland dry evergreen forest and its relicts in secondary bushland and grassland, also on termitaria in swamp forest. |
