Saffron Pear

The Saffron Pear in Cape Town’s Company’s Garden is easily identified by the metal crutches and cables bracing its gnarled, ancient trunk. At over three hundred and sixty years old, this specimen of Pyrus communis is widely considered the oldest cultivated tree in South Africa. Planted during the era of Jan van Riebeeck, the founder of the settlement, it originally stood as part of a circle of pear trees intended to provide fruit for the Dutch East India Company’s ships plying the spice trade.