African Blackwood or Mpingo (Dalbergia melanoxylon) 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 and Northumbrian pipes. Furniture makers from the time of the Egyptians have valued this timber. A story states that it has been even been used as ballast in trading ships and that some enterprising Northumbrian pipe makers used old discarded Blackwood ballast to great effect.

Due to overuse, the mpingo tree is now commerically extinct in Kenya and severely threatened in Tanzania and Mozambique. The trees are being harvested at an unsustainable rate, partly because the tree takes 70-100 years to mature.

Relation to other woods

• These days African Blackwood is no longer regarded as being ebony, a name now reserved for a limited number of timbers yielded by the genus Diospyros; these are more of a matt appearance and are more brittle.
• The genus Dalbergia yields other famous timbers such as rosewood, tulipwood and cocobolo.

Names

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

References and external links

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• ARKive - http://www.arkive.org/species/GES/plants_and_algae/Dalbergia_melanoxylon/ images and movies of the African blackwood (Dalbergia melanoxylon)]
• FAO factsheet
• Winrock Forestry factsheet
• Global Trees factsheet
• Mpingo conservation
• Some facts about the wood

Faboideae | Trees of Africa | Wood

Grenadill | Mpingo