The chinaberry tree – also known as Pride of India, white cedar, the umbrella tree and the Persian lilac – was once widely used in Savannah’s streets and parks.
The chinaberry is a small to medium, deciduous tree with distinctive leaves and berries. It flowers in early spring.
Native to the east, its extensive natural territory extending from India through China and the Southeast Asian archipelago down to Pacific Australia and New Zealand, it was imported to North America in the early nineteenth century.
The chinaberry was first introduced through the ports of Charleston and Savannah, soon becoming a favorite street tree in the towns and cities of the South.
One of Savannah’s earliest experiments in the extensive street tree planting that would later earn it the epithet of “Forest City” was with the chinaberry tree. Numerous specimens were planted out along Bay Street in 1795.
The trees were intended to be ornamental, to furnish a promenade along the bluff, and as a preventative against the disease-bearing miasmas believed to be blown in off the surrounding rice fields and swamps.
None of these original trees, of course, remain. The chinaberry is a comparatively short-lived tree. Savannah’s trees, too, were obliged to contend with a range of natural and man-made hazards.
In 1898, dozens of Bay Street’s trees were consumed by a fire. Those that remained were destroyed by a hurricane that same year. All were replaced by the ubiquitous Savannah tree, the southern live oak.
The qualities that originally recommended the chinaberry tree to the councils and citizens of the South’s nineteenth century city give the species today a rather different status.
Besides its widely praised beauty – of form and in its flowers and attractive (though highly poisonous) berries, the chinaberry has many features esteemed in a city tree.
It is very fast growing, attaining a dozen feet or more in height in only a very few years. It requires minimal care, adaptable in a range of soils and conditions. It is reasonably resistant to disease.
Unfortunately, these characteristics – in combination with its prolific production of bird-dispersed seed, which allow the tree to spread itself over a large area with rapidity – have allowed the chinaberry to spread far beyond the city streets and parks in which it was planted.
The chinaberry is currently regarded as an invasive species across much of the southeast, colonizing fields, and especially roadsides and riversides at the expense of other, native species, whose own growth it suppresses with a substance expressed through its leaves and roots.
The chinaberry is no longer recommended as a suitable tree in the southeast, due to this high propensity to spread where it is not wanted.
It was not these features, however, that led to the fall from favor of the originally popular chinaberry in Savannah’s municipal plantings.
The chinaberry’s primary flaw as a street tree is its susceptibility to storm damage. The city’s trees suffered considerably in the frequent storms and hurricanes of the late nineteenth century.
A particularly severe hurricane cycle coincided with the establishment of Savannah’s Park and Tree Commission, created in part to investigate and improve the city’s tree planting policies.
The commissioners decided that the chinaberry, though a beautiful ornamental, was rather less suitable as one of the city’s dominant street trees than the more resistant and magnificent live oaks and palmettos that were favored from the turn of the century onwards.