I am on the way home from Africa. The first half of the trip was a birding trip in Gambia, and the second half was spent with friends in Senegal, one of whom works at the U.S. Embassy. We took a long road trip north from Dakar to the city of St. Louis, not far from the southern border of the Sahara.

Baobabs and Acacias lined this route, providing striking images of tree growth. The Baobabs were impossibly fat, and the Acacias graceful and umbrella-like.

For a while the bulk of the Baobabs mesmerized me. Later I realized that some branches looked blunted, with no twigging. Others had natural branch tapers and lots of ramification. It was the same tree, what was going on here?

Baobab with natural growth. This is a HUGE tree, like a Redwood and impossible to photograph with any real accuracy. (Three photos down is a photo of me standing next to one. I’m an ant.)

Some of the Baobabs had been pollarded. Pollarding is a technique often used on large city trees to keep them small, or in the case of these Baobabs, likely for firewood. Note stubby branches with little taper. 

A Baobab pollarded in the past, but left to grow for a year or two. Notice the break in the taper near the branch ends.

The pollarded Baobabs looked not unlike many deciduous bonsai where the ends are nibbled with scissors each year, without leaving a little elongation. This results in branches with no taper.

Because the Baobab puts down a lot of wood, a naturally growing tree has beautiful, swift taper from trunk to the tips of the branches, making at huge scale a bonsai-proportioned tree. Above, I am standing to the left of the trunk. 

The other main trees on our route were the Acacias, at the opposite end of the tree spectrum: Skinny trunked and flat topped. The desert bunjin, with a broad crown. This photo looks like a pano, all stretched out. But it isn’t. This is the way they grow.

Older Acacias have a predictable headspace beneath them, which I realized on observation is the goat-nibble height. A modest-sized goat on its hind legs can get a good 6’-7’ of reach. After which the camels continue to raise the height of the lowest branches.

Acacias are thorny trees, perfect for a shrike (a rapacious predatory songbird) to impale a mouse or bird on. I found a thicket of them less perfect to walk through.

Acacias reminded me of the Hawthorns of North America, which tend to get flat-topped with age.

Unrelated but fun, this is a termite mound. This is a huge structure, much of it underground like an iceberg. Air channels give a passive cooling system in a hot climate. Clever invertebrates!

I’m at the airport as I post this. It has been a great trip, the magnificent trees aside. I feel lucky to have missed the Harmattan winds that start in January, big dust storms from the Sahara which are bad to breathe and dim visibility. On a day I hope not to repeat, I learned to ration water intake when on a bathroom-less bus for 12 hours that does not take rest breaks. And I am unlikely to forget the huge fruit bats that flew over the city of St. Louis, Senegal as the call to prayer was sounding, with the moonlight over the rooftops.