A fig tree with distinctively smooth, glossy leaves.
Ficus polita (family Moraceae), the polished or dome-crowned fig, is an evergreen shrub or small tree usually up to 15 metres tall, exceptionally 40 metres, with a short, stout trunk and a dense, flat or rounded crown that can spread 40 metres. It often starts life as an epiphyte in the branches of another tree, then sends down aerial roots that root in the ground and become trunks; with this extra nourishment it grows faster than its host and eventually kills it. Its leaves are occasionally gathered from the wild as food, and the tree is sometimes planted as a boundary marker or living hedge, for ornament and for shade.
It grows across tropical Africa from Senegal to southern Sudan, Uganda and Kenya and south to northern Angola, DR Congo, Zambia, Zimbabwe and north-eastern South Africa: in wooded savanna, gallery forest, evergreen and semi-deciduous forest, bushland and coastal rainforest, from sea level to 2,150 metres, on all kinds of soil, even old lava flows. Like all figs, it depends on a single species of tiny wasp for pollination. The "fruit" is really a closed head of flowers: a female wasp enters it, lays eggs in some flowers and pollinates others; the wingless males hatch first, mate and bore exit holes, and the winged females leave carrying pollen to another fig. Because the wasps live only briefly, the trees of a population must flower at different times through the year to keep their pollinator alive. It can be raised from seed or cuttings.
Source: Useful Tropical Plants database (Fern, K.).
Bark and root infusions treat abdominal pain and diarrhoea; leaf infusion is given as a tonic to the sick; a young leaf/bud decoction treats stomach-ache.
The fruit is edible and chewed to relieve indigestion.
A forest and woodland tree.