ABSTRACT
Planted Australian trees from the genera Acacia, Casuarina, Eucalyptus and Hakea have profoundly influenced South Africa’s environment and economy over the past 130 years. White settlers in the Cape Colony imported and planted the first species of Acacia and Eucalyptus in the late 1820s. The economic value and total number of Australian trees raised in plantations sharply expanded in the 1880s and 1890s and continued growing throughout most of the twentieth century, especially in present-day KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga. Today, there are approximately 500,000 hectares of Eucalyptus and 100,000 hectares of Acacia in South African plantations alone, without considering the substantial number of Acacia, Eucalyptus, and Hakea growing outside of commercial plantations (Republic of South Africa, Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, 2008).
