Six palms grow wild in the Seychelles and nowhere else, and the Vallée de Mai is the one forest where all six stand together. It is twenty hectares in the middle of Praslin, and the path runs off sandy ground straight into deep shade. Stilt palms brace on bare granite and thief palms carry leaves like torn banners. Overhead the coco de mer fans, up to ten metres long, overlap thirty metres above the path until the sky nearly closes over you. In a shower you hear the rain hit them long before any of it reaches you. The female coco de mer carries a two-lobed nut that can reach 25 kilograms, and no plant on Earth grows a heavier seed. Split husks and fallen nuts lie along the trail where the wardens leave them, so a share of each year's crop stays in the forest and the palms can replace themselves.
The nut was famous long before anyone had seen the tree. For centuries they washed ashore around the Indian Ocean, and sailors who saw them come up out of the water decided a forest grew on the sea floor. Hence the name: coconut of the sea. Rudolf II paid four thousand gold florins for one and had it mounted in gold. The Seychelles black parrot is not black but sooty grey-brown and crow-sized, and it gives itself away by sound rather than colour. It crosses the canopy gaps fast, so you do the waiting where the fronds open to a patch of sky. A shallow stream threads the valley floor, with the country's only endemic freshwater crab and fish in it, both easy to walk past until you crouch. The old Praslin story is that on stormy nights the male and female palms tear free of the ground to meet, and anyone who sees it goes blind. That grew out of a real puzzle, and the puzzle is still open: bees, flies, geckos and the white slugs that feed on the flowers have all been proposed, and nobody has shown which carries the pollen.