Terminalia ferdinandiana, rich in vitamin C

(writing in progress)

If one is interested in natural sources of vitamin C, here is a plant that offers medicinal levels of ascorbate: Terminalia ferdinandiana (https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/563581-Terminalia-ferdinandiana).
 
Terminalia ferdinandiana is interesting for at least two reasons. Firstly, it will surprise most South African botanists to realise that Terminalia, in Asia and Australasia, is associated with fleshy fruits (dispersed by endozoochory), because in Africa all terminalias and combretums are wind-dispersed.

Secondly, this is a powerful medicinal plant, going way beyond the concept of vitamins. The concentrations of ascorbate are touted as being two orders of magnitude greater than in most species of cultivated fleshy fruits.
 
The aim of this email is mainly to show you exactly what Terminalia ferdinandiana looks like in all its parts. It is a species worth being familiar with, even if one disregards all the hype that inevitably accompanies the discovery of a new source of profit for people who can’t think of plants without dollar signs in their eyes.
 
However, I would like to make a point that is not made by those who promote T. ferdinandiana as some sort of world-beating and novel product of remote Australia. This is that T. ferdinandiana, although Australian, is really just another version of a plant already familiar to southern and southeast Asians for millennia: Terminalia chebula (https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/68671-Terminalia-chebula).

The fruits of these congeners are similar and, although nobody seems to have claimed that T. chebula has particularly great concentrations of ascorbate, T. chebula has long been a major plant in Ayurvedic medicine (southern India) and regarded as an extremely fine medicinal plant in Tibet (at the other end of the Indian Peninsula in the broadest sense).

Besides ranging from Sri Lanka in the south to northernmost India, the plant also occurs throughout the southeast Asian mainland to Vietnam and Yunnan. I read between the lines that it is semi-domesticated, in the sense that it has been so widely planted that nobody really knows what its original, natural distribution was.
 
So the idea of a fleshy-fruited, medicinally valuable terminalia is nothing new to hundreds of millions of people in Asia, and the hype about an Australian relative, with all the overtones of Australian aboriginality, should be seen in the context of the distortion that tends to occur when any kind of industry gets hold of any kind of biology.
 
Rather than viewing T. ferdinandiana as some kind of ‘Australian super-plant’, I suspect that it would be wiser to regard it as a ‘poor Australian counterpart for T. chebula’.
 
Anyway, please follow the captions below for a photo-introduction to exactly what T. ferdinandiana looks like. No South African botanist or ecologist will have come across anything like it, either in the Combretaceae or in any other family. It is a fleshy fruit, but not as southern Africans know fleshy fruits.
 
All the photos below refer to T. ferdinandiana (I have not included any images of T. chebula here).
 
Terminalia ferdinandiana is a large-leafed small tree, semi-deciduous because it sheds some of its leaves in the dry season.
 
http://pics.davesgarden.com/pics/2009/03/11/tropicbreeze/c67a5e.jpg
 
Terminalia ferdinandiana occurs scattered here and there (apparently never as dense populations) in various types of savanna on relatively nutrient-poor soils in northernmost Australia, from Western Australia across the Northern Territor to Queensland, but not as far east as Cape York Peninsula.
 
https://pindanpost.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/terminalia-ferdinandiana3.jpg

If such a tree were found in e.g. Kruger National Park, people would probably not even recognise it as a combretum, let alone a Terminalia. It also looks rather out of place among the northern eucalypts, but does not alter the general appearance of the vegetation because it is scattered here and there as opposed to forming communities.

I have yet to find a photo of T. ferdinandiana in the dry season, so I do not know how bare of leaves it gets.

https://skipas.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/dsc_0613-copy1.jpg?w=460&h=305
 
https://northwestplants.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/terminalia-ferdinandiana2.jpg
 
Terminalia ferdinandiana, like most trees with fleshy fruits, is restricted to well-drained soils.
 
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fUUIBphQBUc/Vl-oby6IRYI/AAAAAAAACa4/9Vwi7BuFzLc/s1600/WP_20151203_08_27_57_Pro.jpg
 
The following shows the distribution of T. ferdinandiana in Western Australia. As you can see, it is restricted to mesic climates, not penetrating semi-arid areas at all.
 
https://florabase.dpaw.wa.gov.au/science/tmap/22878/5303.gif
 
The fruits of T. ferdinandiana fall naturally to the ground when ripe, indicating that its natural dispersers are terrestrial animals. The emu is a candidate although this bird is not particularly common in the habitat of T. ferdinandiana. Note that the fruits are not brightly coloured even when fully ripe.
 
https://qffrl.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/plums-in-handsmall.jpg
 
Most photos on the web show the unripe fruit, picked from the tree for the benefit of the photographer. While this shows the full size of the fruit, this is not the appearance of the ripe fruit that would be ready to eat. (Also please note, by the way, that the palm of this Aboriginal man are pigmented, unlike those of negroes which are flesh-coloured.)
 
http://media.gettyimages.com/photos/kakadu-or-billy-goat-plum-terminalia-ferdinandiana-has-more-vitamin-c-picture-id578314370
 
http://westarnhem.nt.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/img462.jpg

Photos like the following are, I think, rather misleading because it is actually quite difficult to procure fruits in any quantity.
 
https://pindanpost.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/terminalia-ferdinandiana21.jpg
 
The following shows what the fruits look like once naturally desiccated. However, this is not representative of what one would find in the wild, because the fruits are likely to be consumed once fallen, even if only by fruit flies (to which T. ferdinandiana is particularly attractive).
 
http://cache2.asset-cache.net/gc/129306738-seeds-from-terminalia-ferdinandiana-gettyimages.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=6HxdwJeyy9xKl0GtFtrM8EXK%2F61zrFfurxw%2BReyAo1Er4hnRbeHgbZJhdSR%2BrT%2Bft%2F5kN2%2FmXdDrJ6DM5pnYzg%3D%3D

The following shows the large leaves and relatively inconspicuous flowers of T. ferdinandiana.
 
https://pindanpost.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/terminalia-ferdinandiana1.jpg?w=640
 
The leaves in the following photo seem particularly large, which shows the similarity between T. ferdinandiana and the well-known quasi-mangrove tree Terminalia catappa, which has been widely planted along coasts and is no longer a wild plant. The fruits of T. catappa double as endozoochorous and flotational, but I doubt that the fruits of T. ferdindiana are often dispersed by flotation, because the species does not tend to grow particularly near water (despite the impression given by these lush-looking leaves).
 
http://mayh-dja-kundulk.bininjgunwok.org.au/media/W1siZiIsIjIwMTQvMDUvMTAvMTBfNTNfNTVfMjM5X21hbl9tb3JsYWtfZ2FiZW5lX2dhcnJtZS5qcGciXSxbInAiLCJ0aHVtYiIsIjU2M3g0MDYiXV0/man-morlak%20gabene-garrme.jpg

The following shows the developing fruits, which look as likely to form dry capsules as fleshy fruits but in fact to produce fleshy fruits of a peculiar kind.

https://northwestplants.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/terminalia-ferdinandiana-fruit.jpg
 
I do not know why the flowers in the following image look so different to those above and below.
 
http://www.natureword.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Billy-goat-plum.jpg

The following is another view of the flowers of T. ferdinandiana.
 
http://lepidoptera.butterflyhouse.com.au/plants/comb/terminalia-ferdinandiana.jpg

(writing in progress)

Posted on June 27, 2022 09:14 PM by milewski