Candelabra Tree

Overview

The Candelabra Tree (Euphorbia ingens), known across southern Africa as the giant euphorbia, naboom, or common tree euphorbia, is a massive, arborescent succulent plant belonging to the spurge family Euphorbiaceae. Indigenous to the dry savannas, rocky ridges, and river valleys of eastern and southern Africa—from the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal of South Africa north through Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi to Kenya—this monumental botanical wonder reaches heights of 10 to 15 meters. Featuring a dense, rounded, symmetrical crown composed of hundreds of ribbed, upright, segmented green branches, it presents an uncanny physical resemblance to a multi-branched brass candelabrum.

Euphorbia ingens represents one of the plant kingdom’s most extraordinary examples of convergent evolution. While it looks, grows, and functions almost identically to the giant columnar cacti of the American desert (such as the saguaro), it is completely unrelated to true cacti (family Cactaceae), having independently evolved succulent water-storing stems, reduced leaves, and sharp thorns in response to Africa’s arid climate. The plant is fortified with an extraordinarily toxic, acrid, milky white latex sap loaded with diterpene esters that blisters skin on contact and causes permanent blindness if splashed into eyes, protecting the succulent titan from African megaherbivores.

Biology and Physical Characteristics

The Candelabra Tree is an imposing succulent tree featuring a short, massive, woody main trunk up to one meter in diameter, covered in rough, grayish-brown, corky bark. Above the trunk, the crown branches into hundreds of vertical, curving, segmented succulent limbs arranged in a dense, compact hemispherical dome. The individual branches are four- to five-angled with deep, continuous longitudinal ridges (wings) measuring 8 to 15 cm in diameter, constricted at regular intervals into segmented joints that swell with water during wet seasons.

Along the margins of the ribbed branch ridges run paired, sharp, modified spines measuring 2 to 5 mm in length, which represent modified stipules. True leaves are tiny, ephemeral scales that appear only on new growth before quickly falling off, leaving the thick, chlorophyll-rich green skin of the fleshy stems to perform all photosynthetic carbon capture using water-conserving Crassulacean Acid Metabolism (CAM). The flowers are specialized, greenish-yellow reduced inflorescences known as cyathia, clustered in rows along the ridges in autumn and winter. These are followed by three-lobed, purple-red capsules that explode open when mature, flinging hard seeds several meters across the terrain.

Behavior and Ecology

The Candelabra Tree is a cornerstone dominant plant across hot, arid African scrublands, especially on rocky granite koppies and steep cliff faces where shallow soils and seasonal droughts prevent the growth of broadleaf trees. Its massive fleshy stems store thousands of liters of water, allowing it to withstand multi-year droughts that kill surrounding vegetation.

Despite its blistering, caustic latex sap, specialized wildlife have evolved to utilize the candelabra tree. Black rhinos (Diceros bicornis) occasionally consume the branches with apparent immunity, while monkeys and baboons carefully peel and eat the fleshy fruits. In winter, the nectar-rich yellow cyathia attract swarms of bees, sunbirds, and white-eyes, providing vital hydration in dry months. Furthermore, large birds of prey—particularly martial eagles (Polemaetus bellicosus) and vultures—regularly construct enormous stick nests directly inside the protective forks of the dense, thorny crown, where the sharp spines and toxic sap deter tree-climbing predators like leopards and baboons.

Conservation and Human Impact

The Candelabra Tree is evaluated as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List and the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) Red List, remaining widely distributed and locally abundant across national parks like Kruger National Park and Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park.

In traditional African ethnobotany, the caustic white latex was historically boiled into a paralyzing arrow poison and utilized by fishermen to stun fish in quiet river pools. Traditional herbalists use highly diluted preparations as a purgative, though accidental poisonings are dangerous. The lightweight, dried wood is occasionally harvested for creating light doors, planks, and musical instruments. In recent decades, unexplained die-offs of mature candelabra trees in South Africa’s Limpopo Province have been linked to climate-induced heat stress, fungal infections, and wood-boring beetle outbreaks, prompting ongoing ecological research into spurge resilience under changing climate regimes.

Interesting Factoid

The white milky sap of the Candelabra Tree is so corrosive and toxic that a single drop can cause severe chemical skin blisters, blinding eye burns, and historical African hunters even boiled it down to create lethal poison tips for their hunting arrows.