When York Pareik started a 64-acre botanical garden in Madagascar in 2002, he planted 5,000 baobab trees. He will never see them grow more than 10 feet high. “Baobabs don’t flower until they are 100 years old,” he tells me as we hike along a dry forest trail past baby baobabs. “They grow so slow. You cut down one of those big trees they have out (in Western Madagascar), and you’ll have to wait around a thousand years for another to grow to its size.” Pareik leases the land for Parc Botanique des Mille Baobabs from the government. The park is home to chameleons, geckos, hedgehogs and five of Madagascar’s seven baobab species.
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