Sago ensure

If you are looking for a tree to brighten up either the home or garden then a planting shade tree may be just what you need. They have the ability to make the space around them look tranquil and homely and they also make everything seem a little more attractive within the garden. However, you do need to ensure that you choose the right tree for you and your needs.

Choosing the Right Shade Tree for Your Needs

There are so many different types of trees which you can plant in order to give you shade from the sun. However, care does need to be taken otherwise you could end up with a tree which is completely unsuitable.

Things you need to take into consideration include:

• How tall the tree will grow

• How much care the tree will need

• How much light the tree needs

All of the above will make a difference to which tree you actually select. Obviously some grow bigger than others and if you are looking for a tree for your small garden, a huge oak tree may not be what you need!

So you need to take into consideration the needs of each tree you are considering. Are you looking at planting a specific shape of tree? It may sound strange but trees do grow in different shapes but most people do not really take much notice of that. It is also important to not plant the tree too close to the house. It is a well known fact that trees can drain the moisture out of houses and that can cause the walls to crack and become damaged over time. So, space the tree a good distance away and that way your home will stay safe.

You will need to consider just how hardy the tree you are planting is. If you purchase a sago palm plant for example, it will need specialist care and attention and it may not be suitable for all weathers. In order to find out you need to do your research and the same goes with all different types of trees. You cannot expect the tree to grow and protect you from the sun if you do not even bother to take the time to research its needs and look after it properly.

Overall some trees are better for shading you from the sun than others and some good ones include maple, oak, honey locust and ash trees. You just have to make sure that you do the right amount of research and know what the tree needs in order to help it survive.

Andrew Caxton is the editor and journalist of many information websites like http://www.home-decorating-reviews.com , who has written more articles and newsletters on palm trees . A website with tips on sago palm care.

GUTTA-PERCHA, KETCHUP, SAGO

Words from Malay

As we know, English is a mongrel language which incorporates words from something like five hundred other tongues as the result of exploration, trade and conquest. A good example is the small but significant group of well-known words which come to us from Malay.

From late medieval times on, a Malay pidgin called Bazaar Malay (melayu pasar, “market Malay”) became a lingua franca, the common trading language of a large part of the East Indies. Its dominance arose through the port of Malacca (now Melaka) on the south-western coast of Malaya facing Sumatra. In medieval times, Malacca effectively controlled the straits through which the ships trading with places further east had to pass. At one time it was believed to be the largest port in the world.

Traders came to this area for a number of commodities, but principally for spices. This was a hugely profitable trade, to the extent that once spices reached western Europe they almost became a currency in their own right (a peppercorn rent is now notional; in medieval times, a pound of pepper was worth a month’s wages). Linguistically, the ancient importance of such spices as cinnamon, ginger, cloves, pepper and nutmeg is shown by their names in English being as old as the language. For millennia these spices had travelled overland from the East with nobody in the West having any clear idea where they came from. It was only with the growth of seafaring exploration in medieval times that it was realised that they actually came from India and the Far East. There was vast trading advantage to be gained from short-circuiting the slow, traditional overland route with its horde of middlemen along the way, each taking a cut and pushing up the price, and trading instead directly with the source (this, remember, was Columbus’s rationale for travelling westwards, hoping to find an even shorter way to the treasures of the Orient that would not mean travelling round the Cape of Good Hope).

So successive waves of Western traders bribed, negotiated and fought their way eastwards in search of the source of these riches, displacing the Indians who had been the most important merchants in the region. The first group were the Arabs, who brought Islam to Malacca and other parts of the area in the fifteenth century. In 1511 a Portuguese fleet led by Afonso de Albuquerque captured Malacca. The Dutch seized the port in 1641. The British came only in the late eighteenth century, through the British East India Company, taking over a group of ports including Penang and Singapore that were later to be called the Straits Settlements. After the Napoleonic Wars, this included Malacca. So it is not surprising that many of our words from Malay reached English through Portuguese and Dutch.

Merchants formed permanent trading stations, calling them kampong after the native word for “enclosure”; this turned into compound (nothing to do with the chemical sense of the word, which comes from Latin). Stockades around the compounds were usually of bamboo, a fast-growing tough local plant. This word was originally bambu in Malay, became mambu in Portuguese and bamboes in Dutch; nobody seems to know why the final “s” appeared, but when it became an English word the “s” was taken to be a plural and we ended up with a form very close to the original Malay. A godown is a warehouse or store for goods, from the Malay gadong.

The local people were often far from friendly, as the Malay term amuk testifies, spelt amok or amuck in English. The OED quotes Marsden’s Malay Dictionary as its definition: “engaging furiously in battle, attacking with desperate resolution, rushing in a state of frenzy to the commission of indiscriminate murder”. Another pointer is the set of names for local weapons which have found their way into the language: kris, a dagger with a wavy blade; parang, a kind of heavy sheath knife, and sjambok, deriving from the Malay samboq, a kind of heavy whip, now thought of as typically South African, but taken there by traders from the East Indies.

Unsurprisingly, a set of Malay words naming natural products of the East Indies have also come into the language (but not, as I say, those of the spices, whose names long predate direct trade with the area). The cloth known as gingham came from Malay ginggang, originally an adjective meaning “striped”. The material kapok, the soft fibrous covering of the seeds of a tropical tree, is familiar as a lining and stuffing material. The sarong is the national garment of Malayia, though not restricted to that area. The technique of dying cloth called batik is actually Javanese in origin, the word meaning “painted”. We also owe a small selection of words for native wildlife to the language: the cassowary, a large flightless bird related to the emu, was called kasuari in Malay. The cockatoo and gecko also originate here, as does the orang-utan, the great ape called “man of the woods” in Malay. We also have gutta-percha, sago, rattan, and ketchup. This last word may come to us from a dialect of Chinese, but the English word is certainly derived from the Malay kechap, meaning “fish or shell-fish pickled in brine”. The traditional method of rice-growing in the east, in paddy fields, comes from the Malay word for harvested rice still attached to its stem, padi.

A number of words that we normally associate with China have actually come to us from Malay. Our word for a particularly Eastern kind of flat-bottomed sailing vessel called a junk, for example, actually seems to come from the Malay word adjong, no doubt picked up in Malacca. Our name for a particular grade of Chinese official, mandarin, seems to have been derived from the Malay mantri via the Portuguese. The musical instrument the gong is also Malay. Perhaps the most surprising is the container in which we traditionally keep our supply of tea, the caddy; this derives from the Malay kati, a unit of weight of about 1.3 pounds (600-odd grams), which was divided into 16 taels and which turns up all over the Far East. Even more surprisingly, our word tea, though originally Chinese, seems to have been brought to Europe by the Portuguese, based on a Malay variant of the Chinese word.