The Vallée de Mai is a palm forest of twenty hectares in the middle of the island of Praslin, in the Seychelles, holding the wild coco de mer, a palm found only here and on one neighbouring island whose two-lobed nut, shaped like a woman's hips, is the heaviest seed in the plant kingdom at up to 25 kilograms, and it is walked on a shaded loop under fronds that close out the sky, a UNESCO site that General Gordon of Khartoum took for the Garden of Eden. The valley is the one forest where all six of the palms native to the Seychelles stand together, and the path runs off sandy ground into deep shade, past stilt palms braced on bare granite and thief palms with leaves like torn banners, under coco de mer fronds six metres across that clatter in the wind; the palms are male or female, the male carrying a catkin a metre long, and the old Praslin story holds that on stormy nights they tear free of the ground to meet, and that anyone who sees it goes blind. Centuries before anyone found the palm, its nuts washed ashore around the Indian Ocean.
The forest has its own animals. The Seychelles black parrot, the island's only parrot, is not black but sooty grey-brown and reveals itself by sound and movement rather than colour, easiest to find from October to March, when it nests in holes in dead coco de mer trunks and calls back and forth to the nest; the giant bronze gecko lives only in the mature coco de mer canopy of this island, and its rarity has put a price of thousands of euros on its head among collectors abroad. A shallow stream threads the valley floor beneath fallen fronds, with freshwater crabs and killifish, and the nuts are sold in the shop by permit only. The Vallée de Mai is a forest that grows the biggest seed on Earth, and the palms have been here since before the islands were found.