By Ken Wells

     Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal     

     20 March 1997

     Copyright 1997, Dow Jones & Co.

     PRETORIA, South Africa -- Ask Jutta von Breitenbach about South Africa's giant baobab trees, and she answers directly. "There are five very big ones." Ask her where they are, and she is vague.

     "In the north," she says, pointing absently. She has a question of her own: "What is your purpose in asking about the baobab? Why do you want to know?"

     Mrs. von Breitenbach, a serious woman at a desk cluttered with serious tree books, is secretary of the South African Dendrological Society, keeper of this nation's National Register of Big Trees. She has reasons for her caution.

     As big trees go, the baobab, Adansonia digitata, is a whopper. While it doesn't have the majestic height of North America's sequoia or the serpentine grandeur of Africa's red-leaved ficus, it has, well, presence. In fact, South Africa's bushmen believe the tree, some time after its creation, offended the gods, who then commanded it to grow upside down. And in the winter dry season, when the baobab loses its leaves, that's what it looks like -- a massive, squat succulent, with its roots sticking up in the air.

     Doug van Heerden can tell you just how massive: The baobab on his fruit-tree farm in this nation's Northern Province has a girth of 152 feet and, like many ancient baobabs, a giant hollow. Mr. van Heerden, being a modern man and an entrepreneur, puzzled over this for awhile, then decided: He opened the world's first baobab pub. It has a bar, beer on tap, a sound system, seating for 15, standing room for many more and a wine cellar. "The tree," says the affable, 40ish Mr. van Heerden, "has always been used for something."

     That's true. But it is the peculiarly modern uses of the largest of Africa's baobabs -- and the peculiarly modern attention that they sometimes attract -- that increasingly worry passionate baobab lovers like Mrs. von Breitenbach. Another massive baobab in the Northern Province is used as a public restroom; another to store grain and farm implements; another in Zimbabwe is the centerpiece of a private safari lodge. So many people want to gaze at big baobabs that South Africa's National Botanical Institute dug one up in the north late last year and trucked the 7-ton mammoth 600 miles to the south. It was transplanted, successfully, in a specially constructed greenhouse at the National Botanical Gardens near Cape Town.

     And then there is -- or was -- the famous Nonsiang baobab near Tshipise (pronounced chi-PEASY), a South African hamlet about 250 miles north of Johannesburg near the Zimbabwe border. Named after the farm on which it stood, the tree unfortunately stood close enough to a major road to draw thousands of tourists annually. The ground at the tree's base was so trampled that it became impervious to rain water -- and the baobab, so experts believe, died of thirst a few years back.

      The Nonsiang sat third on the Dendrological Society's list of what it calls "very big" baobabs -- those with girths of 100 feet or more. "A tragedy," Mrs. von Breitenbach says. "A tragedy. We must take better care of these big trees." There is a national law that does prevent the logging of registered baobabs; but it says nothing about unorthodox uses.

     Not that the baobab (pronounced BAYoh-BAB) itself is endangered. There are eight species of them: the African variety, six in Madagascar and one in Australia. The African type is the largest and is found in about 20 sub-Saharan countries, from the Sahel region of Sudan and Ethiopia to the northern tip of South Africa. It thrives in low-lying, dry climes that have only sparse to moderate seasonal rainfall. (That's why the Cape Town transplant lives under glass; the wet climate there would kill it.) In some parts of Africa, entire forests of modest-sized baobabs sprout from arid plains.

      But the mammoth trees like Mr. van Heerden's are another matter. They tend to be solitary -- mainly because any peers they once had were long ago vanquished by drought, flood, lightning or marauding elephants. All four, plus a disease called black fungus, insure that only the hardiest baobabs survive to a ripe old age. "The problem with the baobab is that it really doesn't get handsome until it's about 800 years old," Hugh Glen says. "By then, well, anything could happen to it."

     Mr. Glen is a government botanist and certified tree hugger, being a card-carrying member of the Tree Society of Southern Africa. He adjusts his glasses and sips his tea in a Johannesburg hotel lobby where he has come to talk baobabs. He goes to see big baobabs whenever he can. He has penned scholarly baobab articles. He is bursting with baobab knowledge and lore.

     He ticks some off: Elephants, baboons and monkeys all depend on its fruit; bats pollinate them by crashing into the baobab's night-blooming white flowers while chasing insects; beer and tea can be made from the bark but you have to be desperate to drink either. Baby baobabs look nothing like big ones, which led scientists for years to fear, wrongly, that the tree was going extinct. Some indigenous people used the hollows for shelter or storing water, others for preserving their dead. The tree's wood makes pretty good paper and strong rope but lousy lumber; its nearest relative, in fact, is the tree that produces balsa wood.

     Mr. Glen stops for another sip of tea. He explains why having a balsa-wood texture isn't in the best interest of old baobabs; it heightens their propensity for collapse. "It's really quite flimsy stuff," he says. "One day you have a big living tree. The next day -- it lies in a heap on the ground. Dust."

      Then he remembers something else. Perhaps the world's best-known baobabs live in fiction -- a cluster of them clung to the tiny rocky planet inhabited by the Little Prince, the hero of the Antoine de Saint-Exupery novel of the same title.

     From the rocky road approaching Mr. van Heerden's farm near the town of Duiwelskloof, it is pretty hard to miss his baobab; it looms up from the veld like some arboreal equivalent of a brontosaurus.

     Mr. van Heerden can be found inside his tree pub, pouring a cold, frothy mug of Castle, South Africa's answer to Budweiser, and waxing philosophical about baobabs. He says that, of course, he knows some purists don't take kindly to his turning the tree into a saloon. But he points out that he bought his farm five years ago largely because he fell in love with the tree; if it fell over, he would be heartbroken -- and lose one of the great party venues in the Southern Hemisphere.

     He offers a tour and an explanation. The hollow -- actually two separate chambers -- existed for centuries. Four years ago, though, his farm workers set a fire inside to drive out snakes. This enlarged the hollow somewhat, but didn't harm the tree; the tree is in full-leaf regalia at the moment, and he points out new shoots projecting from its interior walls.

     The tree had a large, natural opening that Mr. van Heerden squared off with a chainsaw to create the pub's door. He shoveled out a few hundred years of bat guano (discovering some bushmen artifacts in the process), tiled the floor and brought in lights, plumbing and bar bric-a-brac -- a ship's clock, bell and various whatnots. The hardest part was drilling through the tree's 7-foot-thick walls; it took two days.

     Mr. van Heerden rents the pub out for 250 South African rand (about $55) a night for weddings and parties and opens it to the public now and then. Two years ago, his wife, Heather, threw him a birthday bash. "It was a rave," he says. "We had 57 people dancing inside the tree."

     Andy Coomber, a British backpacker staying at a nearby lodge, has come to Mr. van Heerden's pub out of curiosity. He isn't dancing in the tree, but he has a guitar and is plucking out a folk song. He adds one attribute that baobab boosters haven't thought of. "Great acoustics," he says.

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