In case you haven’t noticed I have a thing about baobabs.

Here are a few reasons why: I am awed by their size and the way they dominate the surrounding countryside and tower above all the other trees. I love the drama – all those tentacle-like branches spreading out laterally, as if they want to pluck passing birds from the sky.

I admire their tenacity, the fact that they thrive in the most harsh and arid of conditions. I am impressed by the huge age they can reach.

There is something very ancient and wise and holy about them. They seem to speak of the Old Way. They stir the spirit and the eye.

Baobabs are also very much part of my inheritance. Although some people might be surprised to hear this– the ones who associate Nyanga with mountains and bracing cool weather and therefore no baobabs – our old family farm, Nyangui, in Nyanga North, was littered with them.

You passed by a whole grove when you drove through the farm gate. There were baobabs on the top of koppies and among the ancient ruins and there were baobabs growing in the middle of the old lands. My brother, Paul, sited his house next to one.

There was a baobab, across the river, which my brother, Pete, and I carved our initials in to when we were still schoolboys – hoping that, in centuries to come, some explorer would stumble upon them and wonder who we were? It was a wasted stab at immortality. When I went back to the old farm, many years later, the baobab had collapsed and died.

Since then, baobabs have continued to act as signposts in my life. One of my favourite stopping places in Zimbabwe is the lay-by you come to as you descend the Zambezi escarpment from Makuti to Chirundu (and Mana Pools). It has become a little ritual of mine – alas, not one I have done for years – to always pull over here and have a beer.

From this perfect vantage point you have a magnificent view over the valley floor, stretching in to the blueness of distance with the hills of Zambia simmering in the heat haze on the horizon. In the mid-ground you can glimpse the glittering blue waters of the great river, snaking its way eastwards towards the Indian Ocean.

And no matter in which direction you gaze you will see baobabs poking up above the sunken contours of the far-reaching landscape.

As you continue driving down the escarpment, the heat comes up to meet you. You can smell it as well as feel it: a dry, punching, smell of dust and jessie bush and mopani leaves and elephant dung. And baobabs.

Even now, thousands of kilometres away, sitting on top of my hill in the Karkloof, I still get misty-eyed when I recall that view.

Moving to South Africa I was able to renew my love affair with baobabs when I started going on my birding trips to the Limpopo valley.

North Kruger was where I first rekindled the romance. As you drive down from Punda Maria towards Pafuri, the terrain begins to break up in to a series of steep sided ridges which a have a tumbled, frenzied look, as if somebody had stirred them up in a giant pot and then left the contents to dry out under the baking sun. And dotted all over them are baobabs.

Undoubtedly, the most famous of these is the one that sits on top of Baobab Hill. This iconic tree served as a landmark on the early trade routes going through the area. Pioneer hunters used it as part of the famous “Ivory Trail” (some of them leaving their names carved on the tree). Between 1919 and 1927 it became the first overnight stopover for black workers recruited from Mozambique to work on the gold mines of the Witwatersrand.

Mapungubwe, another preferred haunt of mine, has its fair share of baobabs too. Like old, petrified giants, they seems to anchor an immense sea of plain and bush and broken red koppies that falls away to the Limpopo river.

It is almost like a homecoming to be driving among them.

My paintings, then, are my way of attempting to pay tribute to and glorify these most monumental of trees. I want them to be a celebration of the baobabs heroic scale.

Obviously I take certain artistic liberties. I often tweak them a bit, highlighting and simplifying features. Sometimes I move the baobabs position in the landscape, bringing them closer to, say, a hill I fancy to create a better sense of balance. I lob off odd branches so my canvas doesn’t look too cluttered or become mired in detail. I play around with light and colour in the hope of capturing a particular moment or mood.

I try and encapsulate the loneliness, the wildness and the spirit of the primeval world in which they have existed since time began, a world in which man is still very much the intruder.

In doing this, I know I can never pay full justice to these magnificent trees although I hope I do manage to convey something of my admiration and my awe.

Disdainful in their own majesty, serene in the mellow certainty that comes to the very old they are the very symbol and essence of a remote, half-mythical strangeness.

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