A branch, recently fallen, picked up underneath a eucalyptus tree outside the Jan Smuts cottage at Irene. Given that the photographic evidence shows the koppie upon which the house is constructed (an old officers' mess, transported from Middelburg) was completely barren when Smuts moved in (in 1908), that he planted all the trees himself and that the mother tree of this branch (the rings indicate an age of over 30 for the branch) must be all of 50m tall and 100 years old – then this pawn came from Smuts’s hands.
