From the Field Notes of Colonel Aubrey Fitch-Harrington, FRS

Observations Upon the Fauna of Southern Africa — Volume III (In Preparation)

“The Quiver Tree (Aloidendron dichotomum) is not a tree. It is an aloe — a succulent, the largest of the aloe species, growing to eight metres in Namaqualand and southern Namibia. The San used its hollow branches as quivers for arrows. This is the origin of the name and not an accurate description of the plant’s botanical identity. It is now listed as vulnerable due to climate change: the range is contracting northward as temperatures rise in its southern habitat. The southern populations are not reproducing. The old trees remain but the young are not establishing. The author notes that this is a plant carrying a human name for a human use, classified incorrectly as a tree, now retreating north. He notes these three things separately because each one is complete on its own.”

He had been calling it a tree.

Everyone called it a tree. It appeared in the field guides under trees. It appeared in the landscape as what trees look like in places where trees have to work harder: upright, branching, reaching. He had been looking at it correctly for years and calling it the wrong thing.

He was reading the taxonomy.

An aloe. The same family as the small spiny aloes he had been stepping around on rocky outcrops for two volumes, but grown to a different scale for a different landscape. Not a tree. A succulent that had reached eight metres because the Namaqualand and Namibia environment had produced a specific pressure toward that height over a long period.

He looked at his field notes, where he had written quiver tree in the trees section without once questioning the category. The plant had been an aloe throughout. It had not changed its classification to accommodate the author's field notes. The field notes had simply been wrong about what category they were keeping.

And now the retreat.

He had the distribution map. The southern limit was contracting northward year by year. The reproduction was failing in the south. The trees remaining there were old trees. They would stand for decades, perhaps longer, but they would not be replaced. The range was moving north at a rate that was measurable decade by decade and that would be significantly measurable century by century.

The evening air in quiver tree country smelled of dry rock and the specific mineral quality of the Namaqualand substrate, the smell of the ancient landscape the trees had been standing in since before the name.

“It is leaving,” Cetshwayo said.

“The southern range is going.”

“Yes. It is already north of where it was.”

The Colonel considered this. The plant had been standing in its current location for longer than the change was happening. Some of the old trees were certainly older than the people who first noticed the retreat. They did not know they were at the southern limit. They were simply standing where they had always stood, and the conditions were no longer what they had established themselves in.

“Does it know?” he said.

“No,” Cetshwayo said. “It is not that kind of knowing.”

“But the young are not establishing.”