This tree is a symbol of the African savannas. It is associated with strength, power, and, to some extent, eternity. It is impossible to confuse it with any other plant. Locals call it either a pharmacy or a magic tree. This message is about him - the famous baobab.
General information
Its name most likely comes from the Arabic word "buhubab", meaning "a fruit with many seeds." Baobabs belong to the Bambax family, which includes about three hundred species of various trees growing in the tropics. Perhaps the most famous is the type of Adansonia Fingers. It got its name in honor of the French scientist M. Adanson, known for his extensive research activities in the field of flora and fauna of tropical Africa.
The thickness of the baobab trunk is amazing, often reaching twelve meters. But there are also reports of real giants with a trunk diameter of over 40 meters, and it is generally listed in the Guinness Book of Records. a unique specimen with a diameter of 54.5 meters. But this is not surprising, because baobabs are one of the oldest living creatures on the planet. And although it is extremely difficult to determine the exact age of these trees due to the absence of annual rings in them, the "godfather of the baobabs" Michel Adanson estimated only a 9-meter tree at 5 thousand years.
Baobab Legends
There are many legends about these plants. According to one of them, this tree got its very peculiar appearance due to the slowness of the hyena. The seeds of his hyena went to the very last, and she, offended, planted a tree upside down. Since then, it has been growing like this unusually - with its roots up.
An old Indian legend says: standing under the branches of a baobab will receive everything he asks for.
Features of the life of baobabs
During the dry season, the tree sheds its leaves. At the same time, it throws out flower buds on leafless branches, located on long pedicels. The actual flowers open late in the evening and bloom a single night. With their fragrance, they lure those who are pollinators of the baobab.
After a while, already pollinated flowers turn into fruits, which in size and shape resemble a cross between small melons and large cucumbers with raw felt pubescence. They have a quite decent taste, and in addition to humans, they are willingly eaten by wild animals, especially monkeys and elephants. By the way, because of such an addiction of monkeys to baobab fruits, it is sometimes also called a monkey tree. Elephants at baobabs use almost everything: fruits, leaves, even the core of a tree.
is legendary and the life force of the plant. If the bark is torn from it, the baobab does not die. The bark on the tree is restored. It will not die even if it falls to the ground. It is enough to maintain contact with the ground at least one root, and the tree will grow lying down.
The report on baobabs can go on, talking about it for hours. In African lands, it is difficult to find a plant that enjoys the same popularity and ardent love as this wonderful tree.
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Baobab is a species of trees belonging to the genus Adaxonia, the family - Malvaceae, the order - Malvotsvetnye, the class - Dicotyledonous, the department Flowering, the kingdom - Plants.
Among the common features of all malvotsvetnye plants can be called the palmate shape of the leaves.
When they start talking about the oldest green giants, they first of all remember amazing trees - baobabs. Scientists call them living reminders of the planet and believe that some trees in Senegal are between 5 and 5.5 thousand years old. Unfortunately, it is impossible to confirm these data, since the baobab does not have rings by which the age of the tree can be calculated.
African baobab - best known as Adansonia (Adansōnia). He received his championship for an interesting appearance: his height is quite small - only 18-25 m, but overly swollen trunks reach 10 m in diameter, and 30-40 m in circumference. In 1991, the Guinness Book of Records talked about the baobab circumference 54.5 meters. Its crown was almost 38 meters in diameter.
Adansonia palmata is a deciduous tree with uniquely shaped branches that look more like roots.
On the island of Madagascar there is an alley of baobabs belonging to the species Adansonia grandidieri
adansonia fony
These extraordinary trees begin to bloom when they do not yet have leaves. At this time, the baobab looks just great: buds appear on long thin pedicels on bare twisted branches.
By evening, they bloom into huge (up to 20 cm) snow-white flowers that continue to bloom for only one night.
Their fragrance attracts bats that pollinate the plant. The sense of smell of these animals is specific, because the smell of baobab flowers is more like decomposition. It is better for an unprepared tourist to consider this miracle of nature from afar, otherwise he will be disappointed with the aroma, not having time to admire the flowers.
The wood of giants is porous and soft, and during rains it is able to accumulate up to 120 thousand liters of water. Thanks to this, elephants have chosen baobabs: animals almost completely eat strange trees, while receiving food and water.
With the onset of heat, the baobab decreases in size. The high humidity of wood favors the defeat of pathogenic fungi, which are the cause of the appearance of huge voids in the trunks. Indigenous peoples adapt them for pantries, and sometimes even for temporary housing. But this is not the only use of the trunk: in one of the villages of Northern Australia and in the town of Kasane in Botswana, the emptiness of the green giant was adapted for a prison.
Adansonia grandidieri
In Zimbabwe, a baobab replaced a bus station, freely accommodating 40 passengers, and in Namibia, a bathhouse was built in an empty tree trunk, where even a bathtub fit.
Aboriginal people eat the leaves, bark, fruits and seeds of the baobab, make the most unexpected things from them: spices, dishes, drinks, soap, vegetable oil, paints, fabrics, medicine, glue, thread, strings, fishing nets and strong ropes that cannot tear even an elephant.
Baobab tree video
The baobab wonder tree is not the only reservoir of water in nature: in a similar way, the Moringa jar tree in Southwest Africa, the Idria boojum tree from California, similar to an inverted carrot, and Australian bottle plants survive in difficult conditions. .
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24.05.2016
Adansonia is the scientific name for baobabs. This is a genus of trees from the Malvaceae family. Inhabitants of dry savannas and semi-deserts of tropical Africa, Australia, Madagascar and some small islands. These are extremely unusual plants rich in paradoxes. Let's get to know them better. To do this, we have collected the most interesting facts about baobabs.
- The genus Adansonia got its name from the famous taxonomist Carl Linnaeus. He named it in honor of the famous explorer of Africa, one of the founders of the taxonomy of the French botanist Michel Adanson, who gave a detailed description of the baobab.
- Baobab has only 8 species, six of which are endemic to Madagascar. One species is common in Australia, and the last (Adansonia digitata) is typical of Africa and nearby small islands.
- The baobab is called the “reverse” tree, the “upside down” tree, the tree growing with its roots in the sky and many other nicknames that reflect the amazing appearance of this colossus, which nature has endowed with a large squat trunk and powerful branches stretching to the sky just like roots go into the ground.
- The circumference of the trunk of this tree varies with the season and can sometimes exceed 25 meters in diameter. The fact is that its trunk stores water for a period of drought, which helps the plant survive in harsh conditions and save animals and people nearby from thirst. With the arrival of rains, its loose trunk is filled with water and swells, for which it is also called a bottle tree. It can store 100 and even 130 thousand liters of water. This is enough to survive the entire dry season, during which it becomes significantly narrower.
- Due to the characteristics of the wood, the age of the baobab cannot be determined from the growth rings. Attempts to determine the age of the tree using radiocarbon dating have made it possible to date a tree in Namibia to about 1400 years of age. According to scientists, this durable tree can live from 2 to 4 thousand years, depending on growth conditions.
- Baobab is the only tree capable of regenerating bark where its wood has been exposed.
- Its roots first grow down, but do not penetrate deeper than 3-4 meters, then grow to the sides of the trunk up to 50 meters. Its roots are relatively weak, despite the fact that the rest of the tree is colossal. It is very sensitive to winds, which often uproot it.
- I call the baobab the monkey bread tree because these animals are very fond of the juicy pulp of its fruits. The word baobab comes from the Arabic "buhibab" - a fruit with many seeds. The fruit pulp is sour in taste. It becomes mealy when ripe and contains about a hundred bean-shaped seeds.
- The baobab has few leaves. With a length of 15 cm, they are arranged alternately and are palmate. Each of them consists of 5-7 lanceolate leaves, arranged like fingers on a hand, hence the name of the species - digitalata (fingered). They fall at the beginning of the dry season.
- Adansonia palmate blooms at the end of the dry season. Its large, white, pendulous flowers with a long or very long stalk and five petals reach 10 cm to a meter in length. They begin to open in the afternoon at sunset. Opened in the evening, they fall the next day between dawn and sunrise. During their short life of only 12 hours, they emit a very strong smell, similar to the smell of a rotting fruit. All other baobabs have flowers directed upwards. Hanging flowers are pollinated by animals in the form of fruit bats, and baobabs with flowers growing upwards are most often pollinated by butterflies. Some nectar-eating mammals also serve as pollinators, such as poppies - small lemurs that feed on flowers, fruits and leaves of these trees.
- Baobab leaves are mercilessly eaten by animals, young branches are cut down by people. Fortunately, the baobab has the strength to survive these adversities. It has a thick layer of chlorophyll under the bark, which allows the tree to survive in the absence of leaves. This is especially necessary during the dry season, when the leaves completely fall off.
- People use all parts of the plant except for its loose wood, although water is extracted from it in dry times. Ropes were made from the bark of Adansonia digitata. Juice is obtained from the pulp of its fruits. The fruits are simply eaten like candy. The young leaves are cooked like spinach and are rich in iron and calcium. Ground and prepared for a compress, they have gained fame as an antipyretic.
- In Senegal, griots (singers, musicians, storytellers of the peoples of West Africa) were buried in baobabs so that their remains would not become barren of the soil. The same was done with lepers in Burkina Faso.
In some areas of Madagascar, young baobab trees have been gone for several centuries. Two species endemic to this large island will soon become endangered. Botanists are saving the remains of these species by storing their seeds in specially designed seed banks. Is this tree, which is of great value to man, destined to one day disappear? Will the baobab one day be wiped off the face of the earth? Everything depends on us.
Impressive baobab trees can surprise even the worldly-wise botanist. Where else could such an amazing creation of nature grow, if not in Africa, famous for its outlandish flora and fauna? These mighty trees live for a very long time, and they have adapted to survive even in desert conditions. Admiring them is really very interesting.
Baobab Facts
- Like most other deciduous trees, they shed their leaves for the winter. True, not because of the cold, but because of the heat and dryness.
- In winter, that is, the driest time, baobabs “lose weight” - they decrease in volume, as they begin to use up the moisture stored in the trunk.
- Old baobabs are usually hollow inside. One of them even has a hotel room.
- In the African country of Zimbabwe, there is a small train station built inside a giant old baobab tree.
- Large baobab flowers reach 20 centimeters in diameter, but their life span is very short - only one night, after which they wither and fall off.
- Baobab wood is porous - this helps it store a lot of water. And thanks to this, baobabs are not cut down, since it is difficult to build something durable from such material.
- Baobabs have fruits. Outwardly, they resemble hairy cucumbers or melons. By the way, they are quite edible, and monkeys willingly eat them. These fruits taste like fresh ginger.
- In Madagascar, the baobab is considered a national symbol ().
- In circumference, the trunks of the oldest and largest baobabs known to us reach 50 meters.
- Baobabs are not pollinated by bees, but by bats that feed on nectar.
- The bark torn from this tree grows back very quickly.
- A cut down baobab may well take root again and continue to exist in this form.
- It is not known for certain how long baobabs live. At least a thousand years, but some scholars give a period of 4,000 years or more.
- Some African tribes roast baobab fruits and then brew what they have, resulting in a drink that is vaguely similar to coffee.
- From the ashes of baobab wood, African healers make remedies for colds and other diseases, and the bark is used to make fishing nets and ropes.
- Informally, the baobab is sometimes called the lemonade tree, because its fruits, dried, crushed and dissolved in water, make it possible to prepare a drink that resembles lemonade.
- Baobab is depicted on the coats of arms of two countries - the Central African Republic (CAR) and Senegal.
- Young leaves of baobabs are edible. Some Africans use them as one of the salad ingredients.
- This is one of the few trees that do not have growth rings. That is why it is difficult to determine the age of the baobab.
- Most often, the baobab is only three times as high as it is wide, but there are exceptions.
Baobab wood has such a soft and porous structure that, when infected with a fungus, it breaks down extremely quickly and forms huge voids. Meanwhile, this does not affect its existence in any way - a tree hollow from the inside is quite capable of surviving for more than a dozen years. The indigenous people of Africa have long adapted to use this hole to their advantage: they mostly store grain there, but there are also more interesting options.
For example, one cannot but be surprised by the fact that in Zimbabwe a real bus station was placed in it, capable of accommodating two dozen people; in Limpopo they set up a bar; in Botswana they planted a plant that in former times was used instead of a dungeon; and in Senegal, poets were buried in them, because it was believed that they were not worthy of being buried in the ground.
Baobab belongs to the genus Adansonia of the Malvaceae family (sometimes it is referred to the Bombax family, since there are no clear distinctions between these families). This tree is found only in the arid savannahs of tropical Africa, in an area covered with grassy vegetation with occasional trees and shrubs. And then, only those who have adapted to survive in the dry season (the year in the African savannah consists of two periods - hot rainy and hot dry).
The baobab acclimatized to local conditions in a rather unusual way: the moisture and nutrients that it absorbs like a huge sponge help it to maintain a wide, often up to ten meters in diameter, trunk (an interesting fact: the widest tree described by botanists had a width 54.5 m - and at one time it was listed in the Guinness Book of Records).
It should be noted that with such a thickness, its height is small and ranges from 18 to 25 meters, only 2-3 times its width - such compactness gives the plant the opportunity not to die under the burning sun.
But the water in the tree retains, preventing it from evaporating, soft on the outside and strong on the inside of the bark, the thickness of which is 10 cm. The roots of the plant also play an important role in preserving moisture, which, spreading over the surface for more than a dozen meters, collect all available to them moisture. An interesting fact is that during the dry period, when the African baobab begins to use up its water supply, the plant decreases slightly in size and does this until the start of the rainy season, after which it begins to increase again.
monkey breadfruit
It is during the dry season that the baobab sheds its leaves and begins to look like a tree that sticks up with its roots. Africans are convinced that this happened due to the fact that the plant angered God when it did not want to live where he intended for it. He did not like it either in the valley of the Congo River (the baobab decided that it was extremely damp here for him), or on the slope of the green mountain.
The plant angered the Creator so that he pulled it out of the ground and stuck it upside down in the middle of the savannah. But the harmful plant liked this area - and it decided to stay here forever, becoming known from the descriptions as a tree whose roots grow upwards.
Having thrown off the leaves, the baobab begins to bloom (it does this from October to November) - round buds appear on the bare branches. At night, they bloom and look like large, about twenty centimeters, flowers with five white petals curved back and dark red spherical stamens. It is interesting that the flower lives only one night, attracting palm fruit bats and bats for its pollination. After that, it withers, begins to emit a rotting smell and falls off.
And after a while, baobab fruits appear, oval or round in shape with a thick fluffy skin, containing delicious sour pulp with black seeds (it is interesting that baboons really like this pulp, which is why the Africans called this plant “monkey breadfruit”).
tree life
It is a long-established fact that the baobab has soft, water-saturated wood, and therefore is prone to various fungi that eat away at it from the inside - therefore, the trunks of these trees are often either hollow or hollow.
Baobab is a tenacious plant, and therefore holes are not a reason for death. Although this still contributes to its gradual destruction: the tree begins to slowly subside - and, in the end, turns into a pile of fiber (although this process will take him several decades, and even centuries).
The bark of this plant is also amazing, if it is torn off, it will not harm the tree, because pretty soon it will grow back.
An equally interesting fact is that if a baobab is cut down or an elephant knocks it down (these animals really like the juicy fibers of its core, and therefore they are able to completely eat it), and only one root remains from the root system, it will still try to take root and continue to grow, but already lying down.
How long the baobab lives exactly, scientists could not really determine: this tree has no growth rings. Botanists tend to think that this tree can live for about a thousand years. With the help of radiocarbon analysis of one of the plants, it was possible to determine that its age exceeds 4.5 thousand years.
Universal Tree
It is interesting that not only baboons and elephants benefit from this tree, but also the Africans who live in them use almost all parts of the tree instead of warehouses and use them in everyday life.
Bark
A coarse fiber is made from the bark of this plant, from which durable fabric, bags, fishing nets, and ropes are subsequently made. Various medicines are made from the ashes, which are used in the treatment of colds, dysentery, fever, asthma, heart disease, and they also relieve toothache and discomfort that occurs after being bitten by mosquitoes, flies and other insects.
Leaves and shoots
Young shoots are used instead of boiled asparagus, salads are made from green leaves, spices are made from dry ones.
fruit pulp
The pulp of the fruit tastes like ginger, so a drink resembling lemonade is prepared from it - for this, the fruit is first dried, then washed into powder and diluted in water. But from the ashes of the pulp, oil is obtained, on which food is subsequently cooked.
seeds
Baobab seeds are eaten both raw and roasted, while roasted grains, after grinding, create a drink resembling coffee.
Other
Flower dust is used to make glue; after drying the hard shell of the fetus, they make glasses from it; and smoke when burning dried pulp drives away insects, especially mosquitoes. Africans also actively use this plant in cosmetology - they wash their hair with a powder made from the fruits of this tree, make soap, and women paint their faces with red juice, which contains the roots of the plant.