By Segun Odegbami
For your Sunday afternoon relaxation away from Sport.
If you are interested in plants this should interest you.
Goron Tula is a very prized fruit indigenous to the village of Tula in Gombe State, Nigeria, and one or two other places in the world. It is called the ‘Miracle fruit’ because of its numerous herbal benefits.
Foreigners, particularly Chinese, are paying premium price for its seeds, and the people of Tula are making brisk business from its trade, now.
The story is that Goron Tula is particularly difficult to cultivate. It grows wildly in warm and arid regions, and never in clusters. There are no plantations of it. A few plants just grow over a wide expanse of land. And that’s it – the forest!
Five years ago, I was gifted five seeds by a relative from Gombe that brought some to sell to Chinese buyers in Lagos.
Purely out of curiosity, I took the seeds to my Agric teacher in SOCA to keep as part of the school’s collection in the science laboratory.
Jeffery read up on the plant and decided to experiment with the 5 seeds. He planted them in five small vases each with a different type of soil in the school’s laboratory. He started to water and nurture them.
Some months later, he told me none was doing well and he had transferred them to marked earth around the school grounds. That was five years ago. I forgot about them completely.
Five days ago, Jeffery, the teacher, met me in school as I was supervising preparation for resumption next week.
He gave me the incredible news.
One of the seeds has survived and has grown into a full shrub on our campus. He took me to see it.
There it was – an ‘impossibility’ before me, green, lush and beautiful, flowering and seeding already, standing alone in the grass lawn like a ‘king-plant’, in the middle of two classroom blocks.
I could almost see the ‘smile’ on the face of the Goron Tula plant growing majestically in the premises of SOCA, in Wasimi, in the South West part of Nigeria.
This picture is the evidence of the ‘impossibility’.
