Dalbergia melanoxylon

African Blackwood
Conservation status
Near Threatened (IUCN 2.3)
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Plantae
(unranked):	Angiosperms
(unranked):	Eudicots
(unranked):	Rosids
Order:	Fabales
Family:	Fabaceae
Subfamily:	Faboideae
Genus:	Dalbergia
Species:	D. melanoxylon
Binomial name
Dalbergia melanoxylon Guill. & Perr.

Dalbergia melanoxylon (African Blackwood, Grenadilla, or Mpingo) is a flowering plant in the family Fabaceae, native to seasonally dry regions of Africa from Senegal east to Eritrea and south to the Transvaal in South Africa.

It is a small tree, reaching 4–15 m tall, with grey bark and spiny shoots. The leaves are deciduous in the dry season, alternate, 6–22 cm long, pinnate, with 6-9 alternately arranged leaflets. The flowers are white, produced in dense clusters. The fruit is a pod 3–7 cm long, containing one to two seeds.

Uses

The dense, lustrous wood ranges from reddish to pure black. It is generally cut into small billets or logs with its sharply demarcated bright yellow white sapwood left on to assist in the slow drying so as to prevent cracks developing. Good quality "A" grade African Blackwood commands high prices on the commercial timber market. The tonal qualities of African Blackwood are particularly valued when used in woodwind instruments, principally clarinets, oboes, piccolos, Highland pipes, and Northumbrian pipes. Furniture makers from the time of the Egyptians have valued this timber. A story states that it has even been used as ballast in trading ships and that some enterprising Northumbrian pipe makers used old discarded Blackwood ballast to great effect. The German knife company Wusthof has also begun to sell a series of knives with blackwood handles due to the wood's moisture repellent qualities. Gresso, a cell phone manufacturer based in Russia, recently began selling luxury cell phones whose casing is made from African Blackwood.

Due to overuse, the mpingo tree is severely threatened in Kenya and needing attention in Tanzania and Mozambique. The trees are being harvested at an unsustainable rate, partly because of illegal smuggling of the wood into Kenya, but also because the tree takes upwards of 60 years to mature.

Relation to other woods

• African Blackwood is no longer regarded as ebony, a name now reserved for a limited number of timbers yielded by the genus Diospyros; these are more of a matte appearance and are more brittle.
• The genus Dalbergia yields other famous timbers such as Brazilian Rosewood, Dalbergia cearensis and cocobolo.

Names

Other names by which the tree is known include babanus and grenadilla, which appear as loanwords in various local English dialects.

Conservation

There are two organisations involved in the conservation of African blackwood, the Mpingo Conservation Project and the African Blackwood Conservation Project.

The Mpingo Conservation Project (MCP) is involved in research, awareness raising and practical conservation of African Blackwood. Conservation of Mpingo and its natural habitat can be achieved by ensuring that local people living in mpingo harvesting areas receive a fair share of the revenue created, thus providing them with an incentive to manage the habitat in an environmentally friendly manner. In order to achieve this the MCP is helping communities to get Forest Stewardship Certification. Link http://www.mpingoconservation.org/ and http://www.sustainableblackwood.org/.

The African Blackwood Conservation Project works around Mount Kilimanjaro replanting African Blackwood trees, and in conservation education. It also works with adult and women's groups in the promotion of environmentally sound land uses. Link http://www.blackwoodconservation.org/index.html

Small growers in Naples, Florida have been successful in growing African blackwood there. Growth habit in Florida yields taller, larger trees, and the rich soil combined with ample nutrients and long growing season yields timber of superior quality at more sustainable rates. Hopefully ventures like this will be able to take strain off of African reserves and allow this timber to be used in the future.

References and external links

• World Conservation Monitoring Centre (1998). Dalbergia melanoxylon. 2006. IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. IUCN 2006. www.iucnredlist.org. Retrieved on 11 May 2006.
• ARKive - images and movies of the African blackwood (Dalbergia melanoxylon)
• Tanzania: Protecting the World's Most Expensive Tree
• FAO factsheet
• Winrock Forestry factsheet
• Global Trees factsheet
• Mpingo conservation
• Sustainable Blackwood - the Sound and Fair campaign
• Some facts about the wood
• Direct source for local Mozambican African Blackwood
• ENVIRONMENT-TANZANIA: Protecting the World's Most Expensive Tree
• Dalbergia melanoxylon in West African plants - A Photo Guide.