Common Name:

General Information

Ficus dicranostyla is an evergreen or briefly deciduous shrub or tree with a rather open crown. It varies in habit from a shrub no more than 2 metres tall up to, and more commonly, a tree up to 20 metres, exceptionally to 35 metres tall[, ]. The cylindrical bole can be unbranched for up to three-quarters of the tree's height and 100cm in diameter[].
The tree is sometimes harvested from the wild for local use as a food and medicine.

Known Hazards

None known

Botanical References

Range

Tropical Africa - Senegal to Sudan and Uganda. Also in southeast DR Congo and northern Zambia.

Habitat

Wooded grassland; often in rocky places; savannah; forest, gallery; lateritic pans; termite mounds; rain-forest patches; miombo woodland; semi-deciduous forests, at elevations from sea level to around 1,300 metres[, ]

Properties

Edibility Rating
Medicinal Rating
Habit	Tree
Height	15.00 m
Pollinators	Wasps
Cultivation Status	Wild

Cultivation Details

Fig trees have a unique form of fertilization, each species relying on a single, highly specialized species of wasp that is itself totaly dependant upon that fig species in order to breed. The trees produce three types of flower; male, a long-styled female and a short-styled female flower, often called the gall flower. All three types of flower are contained within the structure we usually think of as the fruit.
The female fig wasp enters a fig and lays its eggs on the short styled female flowers while pollinating the long styled female flowers. Wingless male fig wasps emerge first, inseminate the emerging females and then bore exit tunnels out of the fig for the winged females. Females emerge, collect pollen from the male flowers and fly off in search of figs whose female flowers are receptive. In order to support a population of its pollinator, individuals of a Ficus spp. must flower asynchronously. A population must exceed a critical minimum size to ensure that at any time of the year at least some plants have overlap of emmission and reception of fig wasps. Without this temporal overlap the short-lived pollinator wasps will go locally extinct[].

Edible Uses

Young leaves - cooked and eaten as a vegetable[].

Fruit[]. The yellowish to pale orange, globose to obovoid fruit is 10 - 25mm in diameter[].

Medicinal

The plant has traditional medicinal uses[].

Other Uses

Info from [] to be entered

Propagation

Seed -

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