The Vallee de Mai: a paradise garden in the Seychelles

UNESCO Courier, April, 1994 by Guy Lionnet

THE granitic islands of the Seychelles archipelago, rising from a large submarine plateau that may have been the legendary land of Lemuria, are like great hanging gardens. Forming, so to speak, a "microcontinent" of their own, they bear little resemblance to the other islands, volcanic or coralline, of the Indian Ocean. They are distinctive in other respects too: one of them, Praslin, is home to an astonishing native species of palm, the famous coco-de-mer.

Two hundred years ago, these as yet virgin islands were covered in vast, tropically luxuriant rainforests that filled the ravines and valleys and clambered up hills and mountains.

In the lowlands, up to an altitude of 300 metres, grew giant trees more than 30 metres tall and with boles of 15 to 20 metres in diameter, and even they were dwarfed by the superb Dipterocarpaceae, as much as 65 metres tall.

Between the altitudes of 300 and 600 metres was intermediate forest that formed a canopy only twenty or so metres above the ground but was very rich in endemic species. Huge bare boulders emerging like islets from a sea of greenery provided a habitat for interesting communities of ferns and of orchids, including the paille-en-queue with its gorgeous spray of mother-of-pearl flowers and delicious gardenia-like scent.

On the mist-shrouded heights, the trees grew to no more than 15 metres, but it was here that the pitcher plant or Nepenthes was to be found, usually winding itself around a species of mangrove tree that also grew there.

These ancient forests, with their botanical links to Africa, Madagascar, India and Malaysia, were largely replaced by plantations, leaving only a few precious vestiges on the mountain tops of Mahe and Silhouette Islands. A few of the smaller islands such as Praslin provide the last natural sanctuaries for the coco-de-mer.

A LIVING MUSEUM

The Vallee de Mai Nature Reserve is perhaps the most attractive and interesting of these sanctuaries. It is easily accessible by means of the well-surfaced road linking the villages of la Grand' Anse and la Baie Sainte-Anne. As it is only some 18 hectares in area, it takes only an hour to walk the length of the path that runs round it. The low hill overlooking it affords a superb all-round view. Its shady groves of palm and pandanus give the visitor some idea of how beautiful the woodlands of Praslin must once have been.

The Vallee de Mai is an outstanding reminder of what the world's flora was like at an earlier stage, a kind of living museum. Much too small to survive on its own, it owes its continued existence to human intervention. It is thus both a fine example of rational management of the environment and a conservation area for rare and interesting botanical species. These include the bois rouge (red wood), a large-leaved tree of the Dilleniaceae family so called for its brightly coloured trunk; the capucin, a sapotaceous plant whose large seed resembles a hooded head; the latanier latte, a palm with large, stiff, dark green fronds; the palmiste, perhaps the handsomest of Seychellean palms; and two species of pandanus, the vacoa parasol with its perfectly symmetrical triple branches, and the vacoa marron with its astounding aerial prop roots, sometimes over 30 metres in length.

As if to make up for the solemn immobility of its trees, the forest swarms with animal life: emerald-green geckos, big dark-brown snails of the primitive Acavideae family, big, black but reputedly harmless scorpions, lovely shimmering snakes, little "tiger chameleons", tawny-breasted bats, big-billed bulbuls, charming soui-mangas, red, white or blue fruit-eating pigeons, and the little vasa parrots whose clear, strong whistling call shatters the silence of the valley in the early morning and late afternoon.

Indisputably, however, it is the 4,000 coco-de-mer palms, a unique population of trees whose splendour rivals that of the cedars of Lebanon or the giant redwoods of California, that make the Vallee de Mai one of the botanical wonders of the world.

THE LOVE-LIFE OF THE COCO-DE-MER

Lodoicea sechellarum, the coco-de-mer, is one of the six species of palm native to the Seychelles. With its straight, bare trunk, its fans of large, stiff fronds and its huge fruits, it is a truly majestic tree.

Like all members of the Borasseae family, it is dioecious, i.e. the male and female reproductive organs, stamen and pistil, grow on separate plants; the male and female palms stand side by side like a loving couple. Unable to live one without the other, the two sexes are similarly proportioned. There are several surprising things about them. The male is about five metres taller than the female and appears to be protecting her; its stamen resembles a large penis. Under the smooth, shiny epidermis of the fruit, a huge, green, heart-shaped object some 50 cm. long and weighing 15 to 20 kg., the nut itself--the "sea coconut", the biggest and heaviest seed in the vegetable kingdom--consists of two grey-black lobes, covered in a very tough integument and with a narrow groove between them, recalling a smoothly rounded pair of female buttocks. According to an old Seychelles legend, on wild stormy nights the coco-de-mer palms consummate their union in a strange ceremony to witness which spells death to humans.