New Delhi, March 24 -- Recently, we found ourselves standing before an ancient baobab tree in Shirala, a small town nestled at the foothills of the Western Ghats in Sangli, where we had gone to attend a wedding. The tree stood with a majestic height of 22 metres just three kilometres from the wedding hall.

Its thick, twisted trunk was 6.35 m in girth and held up a canopy of leafless branches that looked like upside-down tree roots reaching up into the sky, standing out sharply against the blue background, as if the tree has been flipped upside down - a delightful marvel in the world of nature.

A local man was performing a puja, making 108 pradakshinas (circumambulations) around the tree. Being agroforestry practitioners, we were thrill...