Honolulu calls this one the Dead Rat Tree.
Baobab
Adansonia digitata
Adansonia digitata belongs to the dry savannah of Africa, where it stores water in a swollen trunk and can live a thousand years. We map 8 of them, in 6 cities.
Carried across oceans, it puts on girth astonishingly fast. Honolulu's Foster Garden tree, nicknamed the Dead Rat Tree for its grey, furred seed pods, reached close to thirteen metres round in around ninety years. On the University of Hawaii's Manoa campus, the university built its new Art Building around a baobab in 1973 rather than move it. Brazil has the older ones. Maria Gorda, on the island of Paquetá in Rio de Janeiro, is ten metres round and probably centuries old, though its age is disputed, and a sign in front offers eternal luck to whoever kisses it. In Fortaleza, the city's Candomblé community venerates the baobab of the Passeio Público as sacred.
Oahu
When the University of Hawaii tore down Gilmore Hall in 1973, one thing did not move.
Photo: Floyd A. Reed (CC BY)
A sign in Foster Botanical Garden sends visitors away from its own baobab.
Singapore
There is a baobab in Singapore, and it is only about forty years old.
Rio de Janeiro
The sign in front of this baobab makes an offer: eternal luck to whoever kisses and respects me, and seven years of bad luck for every unkindness done to me.
Fortaleza
For part of Fortaleza, the baobab in the Passeio Público is more than a tree.
Kauai
A baobab is not what anybody expects to find behind a church in Hawaii.
Nisia Floresta
Nísia Floresta will tell you that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry saw this baobab from the air on one of his flights across the Atlantic, and that it ended up in The Little Prince, the book whose tiny pla...
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