It is said that the old boa, when it feels its last breath approaching, slips into a great hollow baobab to end its days there. On the arid west coast of Madagascar, where rain is extremely rare, lies the tropical dry forest, kingdom of the baobabs. Around Tsitakakantsa, a giant more than 900 years old, life has organised itself into a network of interdependencies that deforestation is now unravelling.
It is said that the elders saw the old boa in Tsitakakantsa, one of the largest trees in the world.
Stretching over 2,500 km², the dry forest, where temperatures can reach 35 degrees, is home to nearly 1,800 plant species, most of them found nowhere else.For the Sakalava, baobabs are the silent guardians of their history, their beliefs, and above all their most precious resource: water. “Here it is very hot and very dry,” says Maurice Félix. In his village, each family has its own baobab: with an axe, a window is cut into the bark, the inside is hollowed out without killing the tree, and rainwater is collected in it. As soon as it rains, people set off to fill it, torch in hand, even at midnight, for no one knows when the rain will return. This water keeps families going through more than five months of dry season. Elsewhere, baobabs are not hollowed out: they are revered. Tsitakakantsa, whose name means “if you sing on one side of my trunk, you cannot be heard on the other side”, receives rum, tobacco and money. It is only fifteen metres tall, but its trunk is more than thirty metres round. Fibrous like a sponge, it can hold up to 120,000 litres of water; the tree gives up its leaves to transpire less, and its roots lie in wait for the slightest drop in the top two metres of soil.
“It is a blessing for us”: this baobab has changed the family’s daily life, and the children will inherit it in turn.
There are some 200 to 300 hollowed-out baobabs here, an idea of the ancestors, who found them big enough to hold a great deal of water.
The offering is accompanied by a prayer: “Bless us so that nothing happens to us here.” Revered baobabs are credited with magical powers.The sovereign does not reign alone. “There would be no forest without ants,” says the entomologist Brian Fisher. We see only the green cycle, that of growth; insects, and ants above all, dominate the brown cycle. They turn over a very poor tropical soil, mix nutrients through a thick layer of leaf litter and dig tunnels in it that let water seep in: without them, plants would not survive the dry season. At the edge of a nest, he discovers ants removing a shed snakeskin. These giant ants host a large snake, which finds coolness and darkness there and keeps away another snake, a larva eater: a mutualism the local people sensed when they called it “the mother of ants”. Each species has its strategy. The herpetologist Frank Glaw follows the chameleon Fucifer labordi, which spends almost its whole life in the egg and lives only four or five months, and chameleons that sway to imitate branches in the wind. The more we disturb these systems, warns Brian Fisher, the more fragile they become.
A botanist to begin with, Brian Fisher turned to ants when he discovered that no one was studying their interactions with their environment.
The colonies of these giant ants dig deep tunnels where all their eggs lie: for a thousand workers, thousands of larvae.
In a forest of browns and greens, each chameleon must choose whether it is better to imitate green, brown, or a mixture of the two.The baobab, for its part, does not camouflage itself. Its leaves drive a pump that draws hundreds of litres of water from the soil every day, and once a year, for just a few hours, the tree flowers. From the morning onwards, the biologist Onja Razanamaro watches for ripe buds: the flower opens at dusk and is active for only three hours, long enough to spread its scent and nectar. That evening, it opens at 7.15 pm. Seventeen centimetres long, it can only be pollinated by an insect with a long proboscis, the hawk moth; the others are mere nectar thieves. A light trap allows her to study them on the ground and compare their proboscis with the flower. But deforestation is accelerating, and the baobabs are left isolated in the middle of fields. Without the insects that contribute to its survival, she says, all the interactions are broken, and baobabs can no longer be promised for the future.
The baobab’s crown offers insects food, shelter, and even a place to lay their eggs.
By flowering, the baobab signals to the whole forest that the ballet of pollinating insects can begin.
The light trap makes it possible to compare the proboscis of moths with the flower, 17 centimetres long: only the hawk moth can pollinate it.The fruits of Tsitakakantsa hold the memory of a vanished fauna. A few centuries ago, elephant birds, giant lemurs and colossal tortoises tore open their husks and sowed their seeds; humans and climate change wiped them out. Today, no diner swallows the fruit whole, the only guarantee of germination, and the young shoot cannot grow in the shade of its parent. The primatologist Herman Rafalinirina follows the lemurs, gardeners of the forest: to be a disperser, an animal must carry the seeds more than a hundred metres from the mother plant. He collects their droppings the moment they fall, a treasure for researchers, and counts six seeds in them. But none of them is strong enough to crack the baobab’s shell: “the baobab has become an orphan tree”. Hamill Harrisson, co-founder of the Dry Forest association, is trying to take over. He wants to teach children to protect the forest from primary school onwards: with them, he soaks baobab seeds, sows them and plants the young trees. He knows that families burn the forest to farm it, because people have to eat every day, and he wants to convince them that preserving it is more beneficial, in the long term, than destroying it.
Madagascar has 112 species of lemur, the national emblem; highly mobile, they travel for kilometres and sow seeds along the way.
With no dispersers left, some think that livestock, and even humans, could disperse baobabs today.
With the Dry Forest association, Hamill Harrisson teaches children, from primary school onwards, to sow baobabs and protect the forest.“I feel happy when I touch this baobab. I feel as if I am touching future generations through it.”Hamill Harrisson, co-founder of Dry Forest
“L’arbre qui cache la forêt is fascinating. […] The series goes beyond the trees themselves and the forests it depicts, to remind us of the complexity and importance of these ecosystems.”Mònica Planas Callol, Ara (Barcelona)translated from Catalan · July 2026
“Sumptuous images, a dreamlike voice-over, a hypnotic soundtrack […]. Beneath the trees, we marvel at the intertwining of the infinitely small and the infinitely large. […] By celebrating the majesty of the setting, L’arbre qui cache la forêt urges us to preserve it.”Ouest-FranceJune 2024