Funny and majestic Baobab
If wild symbols the same in North America or Mexico are huge, centuries-old redwoods, or a variety of cactus, for the African continent, especially for tropical savannah, this plant is a baobab, a unique and found nowhere else plant. In addition to its age, which to date have not managed to determine exactly, because baobab unlike other trees do not have annual rings, baobab tree on the right from time immemorial called pharmacy tree for its unique medicinal properties of fruits and seeds.
It should be noted that the traditional his name as always a little bit does not coincide with its scientific name Adanson palmate, Latin is Adansonia digitata, so named because even Carl Linnaeus in honor of the French botanist and his friend Michel Adanson that almost half of his life devoted to the study of Africa. And more prosaic, but more familiar to us the name «Baobab» of the tree, as many etymologists, comes from the ancient Arabic «bu hubab», that is consonant with by modern translations such as «fruit, with many seeds», which in turn correspond to reality.
No less remarkable moment in the life of this plant is its historical and natural age, as a separate species. For a description of this unique plant is found even in the Old Testament sources and legends of ancient Egypt and Greece, where in the early days of the creation of the earth gods were given seeds of baobab least bloodthirsty hyena, and the one offended, that it the seeds of baobab, went into the last turn, I decided to put up the baobab roots.
In view of this fairly – historical fact, overgrown baobabs, which about a thousand years resemble «a giant crow’s nest». And if we just start reasoning about physical age of the plant, then, as we said earlier, at the baobab, as in «abnormal» no tree, not only of the annual rings, which can estimate and calculate, having cut the same redwood.
Overgrown baobabs, trunk diameter of twelve meters and more, just a little bit problematic to cut and dry, as this parameter varies from baobab almost twice a year, depending on the presence or absence of the rainy season in the same tropical savannah. At the same time optimistic estimates of modern scientists and biologists baobab age of this size