HOW ANCIENT ARE BAOBAB TREES REALLY?

I often get asked how old baobabs become. There is a lot of myth with most people believing that they live for up to 5000 years. I have been working with Dr Adrian Patrut, who has made it his mission to find the oldest baobab in the world. He has been at this for about 10 years, sampling trees all over Africa and publishing his results in Scientific Journals. So far the oldest tree dated was the multi-stemmed Glencoe Tree near Hoedspruit that was dated to 1800 years old.(see pic).  In Venda people often say that they live forever. I like to believe they do.

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Baobab Ecology Article Published in Prestigious Journal

Baobab Ecology Article Published in Prestigious Journal

Dr Sarah Venter, founder of the Baobab Foundation, has just had another one of her papers on the fascinating world of baobab ecology published in the prestigious international journal Forest Ecology and Management.

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86 Years of Measuring Baobab Trees!

86 Years of Measuring Baobab Trees!

Skelmwater is a bare stony hillside dotted with baobab trees, but this has become a special place for Sarah Venter and Diana Mayne.  The baobab trees here are each numbered and painted with a neat stripe around their girth.  The girth of these trees has been measured since 1931.    Diana and Sarah discovered this plot in 2002 when they first went to visit it and found that the measurements had been forgotten and no one was measuring them any more.

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Waiting for the baobab fruit to drop

Waiting for the baobab fruit to drop

The area has had lovely late rains, but this has affected our normal fruit harvesting time.  Normally all the fruit would have fallen to the ground by now and been picked up by our harvesters, but this year more than half of them are still on the trees.  So we are waiting for the fruit […]

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