“I often get asked to assess large baobab trees, either for their size or their health,” says Dr Sarah Venter, founder of the Baobab Foundation. “This Greater Kuduland Reserve Baobab is one of the biggest ones I have ever measured”.
With a circumference of 25 m, height of 12 m and crown diameter of 24 m this amazing Bao Mama throws her shadows over a 75m2 area for all creatures living in the vicinity. In comparison, the 1200-year-old Sagole Baobab, the largest baobab tree in South Africa, has a circumference of 32.89 meters and a trunk diameter of 10.47 meters, located east from Tshipise, in Limpopo Province, not very far from this one.
Dr Venter was visiting the reserve with ecology research manager Niall Beddy. This Baobab is growing on the Mopane plains of the Reserve, north of a ridge of sandstone hills, probably since about a thousand plus years ago.
This now magnificent tree would have been only a baby around the year 1022 AD, a time during the late Middle Ages and the start of the medieval period in Europe. In Limpopo, about 80 km west of Kuduland’s Baobab, early Iron Age settlers lived at Mapungubwe Hill melting iron, making their clay pots and traded beads, gold and ivory with the East from about 1000 AD to 1300 AD. Maybe one of them dropped a Baobab seed here, eating the nutritious super food on way to the East Coast a thousand years ago.
See a short video of the measuring up or this beautiful tree.
