The Avenue of the Baobabs is a dirt road in western Madagascar with about twenty-five baobabs, thirty metres tall, standing along both sides. Nobody planted them. A dry forest covered this country, and when farmers cleared it for rice and cattle they left the baobabs where they stood. The row is what the clearing did not take. They are Grandidier's baobabs, a Madagascan tree and nothing else's, some more than eight hundred years old, with smooth grey trunks that swell to three metres thick. The crowns are bare branches that look like roots held up to the sky, so people call them upside-down trees. Here they are renala, mother of the forest, and families still leave offerings at their feet.
The road works for a living. At dawn and dusk families walk it and zebu carts come down it between the villages and the paddies, passing you with the trunks standing over both. Walking it slowly with them, you see the baobabs the way people here do: enormous but ordinary landmarks. Sundown is the hour it fills for: the pale trunks go deep red, the western sky runs from orange to violet, and the colour is often best after the sun has gone. Toward the end of the rains, around March, the paddies still brim and a single grey trunk stands doubled in the flat water. Only when you walk a slow ring around one does the scale arrive. Single baobabs stand scattered through the farmland for kilometres, each left when a field was cleared, and one alone in an open paddy tells you more than the avenue does. They still flower, out of sight. Each bloom opens just before dark, is worked all night by fork-marked lemurs licking the nectar and carrying pollen on their faces, and is finished by morning. What does not follow is a next generation: the giant lemurs and elephant birds that once carried the seed have been extinct for centuries, and this row has nothing coming up behind it.