Silverleaf Trees

I took the photo last week of an endangered (in this case dead) silverleaf tree. It is quite special walking through a silverleaf thicket, as one can in Cape Town. The leaves of these trees have a "distinct silvery sheen produced by dense velvety hairs". But the green-silver trees often turn brown-silver (see the photo), so that one sees dead brown-silver trees against a background of living green-silver trees, or vice versa. It seems that nobody understands quite why the trees die -- and sometimes a whole tree may die within a single day. At the moment, there seems to be more die-off than usual. About 20% of the original trees still stand. One finds them only in and around Cape Town, in thickets.