by Jane Goodall
Sally (a year my junior) and I were the real tomboys. Sue and Judy—the “Little Ones” (three and four years younger than me, respectively)—were not quite as keen on climbing trees and pretending to be Robin Hood and his men. But we got on well together—and, when I was about eleven, I started the Alligator Club. Why I picked the name alligator I have absolutely no idea!
It was a club for nature lovers. We watched the plants and animals and wrote little stories in our nature notebooks about them. Well, to be really truthful, I did those things and did my best to persuade the others to do the same. This was easier when we were together, but when Sally and Sue went home after the holidays, it was hard.
So I put together a magazine. I wrote—by hand as there was no other option at the time—articles about all sorts of things, and asked the others to make contributions. Of course, there was only one copy, so after they read it, Sally and Sue had to return it. In the next edition I asked questions about the articles I had written in the one before. The members were supposed to put their answers in the “letter box”—an envelope glued to the inside of the cardboard cover at the back. After four “editions” I tired of producing this magazine, since it was almost impossible to get the others to contribute, and only Judy answered the questions, and only because I bullied her into doing so! But it taught me a lot.
In fact it may well have been my experience with the Alligator Club that enabled me to persevere in developing what is, today, a movement for young people from kindergarten through university, now in over 130 countries—Jane Goodall’s Roots & Shoots (R&S). The Alligator Club had only four members, including myself. Roots & Shoots is encouraging hundreds of thousands of young people to take action and try to make this a better world for all living things.
Looking at my nature notebook with the carefully drawn and painted flowers, and looking through those magazines, preserved from a time long gone, brought those magical days of childhood alive. I found myself thinking about cold, wet winter days when I used to read, curled up in front of the fire, on winter evenings. Then I traveled in my imagination to The Secret Garden with Mary and Colin and Dickon. I was entranced by C. S. Lewis’s Voyage to Venus, in which he describes, so brilliantly, flowers and fruits, tastes and colors and scents, unknown on Planet Earth. I raced through the skies with little Diamond, who was curled up in the flowing hair of the Lady North Wind, as she showed him what was going on in the world, the beauty and the sadness and the joy (At the Back of the North Wind). And of course I was utterly in love with Mole and Ratty and Mr. Badger in The Wind in the Willows. If The Lord of the Rings had been written when I was a child, there is no doubt I would have been entranced by Treebeard and the ancient forest of Fangorn, and Lothlorien, the enchanted forest of the elves.
Of course, at the same time I was reading more and more about the animals who lived in the wild places of the world. I am so glad TV had not been invented then—it meant I had to, and most certainly did, exercise and develop my powers of imagination.
Those two worlds of my childhood—that of the imagination and that of nature—were, I think, equally important in shaping the person I have become. But although the memories are beautiful and precious, they are bittersweet. Today, most of the fields where I roamed have been sold to the developers, and those that remain have been destroyed by chemical pesticides and fertilizers and herbicides and fungicides and the hedges hacked down to provide more land for more farming. The wildflowers have disappeared from the fields, and many of the songbirds that sang to my young ears are in steep decline. Of course there was always war between the farmers and the animals that sought to share the bounty of their labors, the shooting of rabbits and pigeons, but the mass destruction of wildlife caused by the introduction of chemicals in agriculture did not happen until after World War II. Since then our wildflowers (along with so much wildlife) have been decreasing, becoming extinct in place after place.
And it is the same in so many parts of the world. The health of the soil has gradually been weakened, sometimes altogether destroyed. These days there are acres and acres of farmland where no crops will grow without massive doses of chemical fertilizer. And the chemical poison is contaminating the groundwater, the streams, and the rivers, bringing death to animals and plants alike. Tropical and old-growth forests, those magical places to which I had traveled in imagination, are disappearing at a terrifying rate. The same goes for other types of landscape—woodlands, wetlands, prairies and grasslands, moors and heaths. Indeed, the list is limited only by the types of environments found on Planet Earth.
Everywhere the natural world with its rich diversity of living things is under attack from human population growth, development, industrial agriculture, pollution, and shrinking supplies of freshwater. Habitat loss is a theme that comes up again and again, diminishing the biodiversity and causing local extinctions in place after place. And over and above everything else looms the reality of climate change. The ice is disappearing from the North and South Poles and from the mountaintops.
Yet here in Bournemouth some things have changed but little. The garden at The Birches has continued to provide a magical playground for children—first Judy and me, then our children, and now our grandchildren. Judy has taken on the role of gardener, helped by her daughter, Pip, and our good friend Wayne Caswell. More species of flowers and vegetables are growing—the answer was to acquire better soil and grow a lot of plants in tubs. So today we have sweet peas and morning glory, geraniums and pansies, and many more. And they grow in between peas, tomatoes, spinach, potatoes, and courgettes (zucchinis). The bright-red flowers of the runner beans still brighten the garden on a dull day, and now there are the glossy-black flowers of the broad bean, as exotic as the white fur that you find inside the seedpod when you open it. Danny’s parsley still grows outside the kitchen window, and the little pink flowers on which she waged war have obstinately remained, though not in their original profusion. My precious lilies of the valley have all but gone—the hens we rescued from a battery farm, thrilled with their new freedom to forage in a garden, ate all but a few bulbs! Olly’s greenhouse overflows with cucumbers and little seedlings of all sorts waiting to be planted outside. The pines and firs and Spanish chestnuts are still here, but our birch trees died in the 1975–76 drought, and only one of the three we planted to take their place survived a recent very dry summer. Nooky was trimmed by a tree surgeon—the branches from the old trunk were getting too big and heavy. And amazingly this produced, for the very first time, a massive crop of chestnuts—tiny ones of course.
The neighborhood—the streets, the cliffs, and the chines—is much as it was in my childhood. There has been some “manicuring”—the vegetation growing up the sides of the chines has been thinned out in some places, mainly because it provided an environment for winos and people doing drugs. Branches have been trimmed and some trees felled lest a passerby should be hurt by a falling limb and the city council sued. But the whole area is a conservation area. No one can cut down a tree without permission from the city council, and so the gardens are still green and leafy. When I am here, between my endless lecture tours around the world, there is always a dog to accompany me when, each day, I return to the haunts of my childhood. The current one is Charlie, a boxer cross—before her was Astro, who followed Whiskey, who was preceded by Cida—there have always been dogs at The Birches.
As I reflect on my early life and the experiences that shaped my thinking, I realize that it is not strange at all that I have written this book. What is strange is that this is not the book I first planned to write—that was to be simply a companion to Hope for Animals and Their World, for which I had written a whole section on the kingdom of the plants. But the manuscript for Hope for Animals was too long, and almost all of the plant section had to be cut. I was sad about that—many of those who had contributed their plant stories had been so generous and so pleased for me to write about their work. So I planned to write a short book, simply adding a little to that original
plant section. It was to have been about plant species rescued from the brink of extinction. But it has not worked out that way.
It was as though the plants wanted me to write a different kind of book and sent gentle roots deep into my brain. They wanted me to fully acknowledge their importance in human history, their amazing powers of healing, the nourishment they provide, their ability to harm if we misuse them, and, ultimately, our dependence on the plant kingdom. The plants seemed to want me to share with the world my own understanding of their beingness, so that people might better honor them as important partners in so many of our endeavors.
The more I followed these promptings, the more avenues of thought I pursued, the more I talked with botanists and horticulturists and conservationists, the more fascinated I became and the more horrified at all that we are harming and destroying.
At the same time I was learning so much about the efforts that are being made, all around the globe, to protect and restore the natural world. The plant species that have been saved, in the nick of time, from extinction and given another chance. The work of the botanical gardens, introducing millions of people to the wonder of the plant world while, at the same time, carrying out cutting-edge research on the best ways of propagating endangered species. The people who are growing native plants in their gardens, creating havens for wildlife and insects. The increasing number of those who are prepared to fight for the plants and the trees, the grasslands and the forests. That is the hope.
And so I have written a book to acknowledge the enormous debt we owe to the plants and to celebrate the beauty, mystery, and complexity of their world. That we may save this world before it is too late.
Chapter 2
The Kingdom of the Plants
This strangler fig’s roots are now an integral part of the ancient temple at Angkor Wat in Cambodia. I shall never forget the feeling of stepping back in time, the sense of wonder at these extraordinary ruins deep in the forest. (CREDIT: © JANE GOODALL INSTITUTE / BY MARY LEWIS)
Science divides the natural world into six kingdoms, including the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom. And in both we find huge diversity of form and size and color, and so many fascinating and complex societies. Most people are more familiar with the inhabitants of the plant kingdom, for they are all around us, just about all the time. I have spent a lifetime loving plants, even though I have never studied them as a scientist. And over the years, people have given me marvelous books—collections of photographs of various habitats, and of exotic fruits and seeds and flowers that might have been drawn from the imagination of artists high on psychedelic drugs.
I have walked through forests in many parts of the world and marveled at ancient trees festooned with vines, ferns spreading their graceful fronds beside fast-flowing streams, and rocks clothed in mosses. I have a special love for old-growth forests with their wealth of interconnected life-forms—I always feel that I belong there. But there is so much more to marvel at in the kingdom of the plants. I often use the zoom setting of my camera to photograph the exquisite flowering of tiny plants that most people walk past or trample on, not noticing.
The first time I visited the tundra, in Greenland, I was humbled to see small plants that had sprung into life after enduring eight months under snow and ice. And amazed to learn that they were actually trees—but although they had managed to survive in those bleak conditions they could never attain the typical height of their species. How different that arctic habitat is from the exotic riot of color, the sheer enchantment, of an alpine meadow in spring, with its myriad of flowers, the humming and buzzing and droning as a host of insects feast on nectar, pollinating the flowers so that they will reappear next year.
When I first saw the spring flowers blanketing the California hillsides, I wanted to walk out among the lupines and poppies and wild mustard, and simply lie among them, looking up into the blue, blue sky. But I was restrained, warned of snakes among the flowers, and had to be content just to feast my eyes on their colors and inhale their sweet fragrance.
The plants of the arid parts of the world—the dry plains and the desert—are also fascinating. These are the places where succulents and cacti have adapted to survive long periods without water, storing it in their leaves and stems and roots. Just this past spring I spent a couple of hours wandering in the semidesert of Santa Fe, New Mexico, utterly captivated by the strange shapes of the cacti. I was lucky, for most of them were in bloom, their yellow and red and deep-purple flowers like gifts from Mother Nature in the dry landscape. And I have marveled to see how, after a long period of drought, the first rains will carpet the Serengeti Plain of East Africa with white and golden flowers shining through the dry, trampled grass. Here and there the vivid coral-colored flowers of the aloe plants peek through.
Recently, as I drove from Johannesburg to Nelspruit, in South Africa, I desperately wished there was time to stop off and find an elephant root tree (Elephantorrhiza elephantina), which, presumably able to withstand the cold, dry winters of its harsh upland habitat, lives almost entirely under the ground. If you walk among the branches of what seem like small bushes, rising only some three feet above the ground, you will actually be walking on the canopy of a very large and very ancient tree that is mostly out of sight beneath you.
It would be absurd in a book like this to try to describe the fantastic variety of plants, from the tiny mosses to the mighty redwoods. A recent inventory lists 298,000 different plant species (and 611,000 species of mushrooms, molds, and other fungi). And the authors reckon that as many as 86 percent of all plant and animal species on land, and up to 91 percent in the seas, remain unnamed. All I can do here is to share some of what I find particularly compelling about this vast and wondrous kingdom of the plants.
Roots
Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we had eyes that could see underground so that we could observe everything down there in the same way that we can look up through the skies to the stars? When I look at a giant tree, I marvel at the gnarled trunk, the spreading branches, the multitude of leaves. Yet that is only half of the tree-being—the rest is far, far down, penetrating deep beneath the ground. The roots. Bit by bit they work their way through the substrate, pushing aside small pebbles, growing around big rocks, coiling around one another, taking from the soil the water and minerals needed by the partner up above, and creating a firm anchor for it. In many trees, the roots go as deep below the ground as the height of the tree above the ground, and spread out about three times farther than the spread of the branches. One root system, recorded during excavation of a building site in Arizona, had grown down some two hundred feet.
Some of the so-called “weeds” that colonize our gardens as unwanted guests have very deep roots. The dandelion goes down so far it is almost impossible to get the whole thing out of the ground. I can see my grandmother Danny now, kneeling on her little rubber pad, digging down around the roots of one dandelion plant after another, then trying to yank them out of the ground with that tool that looks like the end of the hammer that you use to pull out old nails. But she never got the whole root out.
There are so many kinds of roots. Aerial roots grow above the ground, such as those on epiphytes—which are plants growing on trees or sometimes buildings, taking water and nutrients from the air and rain—including many orchids, ferns, mosses, and so on. Aerial roots are almost always adventitious (I called them “adventurous” when I was a child), roots that can grow from branches, especially where they have been wounded, or from the tips of stems. Taproots, like those of carrots, act as storage organs. The small, tough adventitious roots of some climbing plants, such as ivy and Virginia creeper, enable the stems to cling to tree trunks—or the walls of our houses—with a viselike grip.
In the coastal mangrove swamps of Africa and Asia I have seen how the trees live with their roots totally submerged in water. Because these roots are able to exclude salt, they can survive in brackish water, even water that is twice as saline as the ocean. Some mangrove tre
es send down “stilt roots” from their lowest branches; others have roots that send tubelike structures upward through the mud and water and into the air, for breathing.
Then there are those plants, such as the well-known mistletoe, beloved by young lovers at Christmastime but hated by foresters, that are parasitic, sending roots deep into the host tree to steal its sap. The most advanced of the parasitic plants have long ago given up any attempt at working for their own food—their leaves have become like scales, or are missing altogether.
The strangler fig is even more sinister. Its seeds germinate in the branches of other trees and send out roots that slowly grow down toward the ground. Once the end touches the soil, it takes root. The roots hanging down all around the support tree grow into saplings that will eventually strangle the host. I was awestruck when I saw the famed temple at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, utterly embraced by the gnarled roots of a giant and ancient strangler fig. Tree and building are now so entwined that each would collapse without the support of the other. I noticed that strangler figs have been at work on many of the Mayan ruins in Mexico as well.
The so-called clonal trees have remarkable root systems that seem capable of growing over hundreds of thousands of years. The most famous of them—“Pando,” or “The Trembling Giant”—has a root system that spreads out beneath more than one hundred acres in Utah and has been there, we are told, for eighty thousand to one million years! The multiple “stems” (meaning the tree trunks) of this aspen colony age and die, but new ones keep coming up. It is the roots that are so ancient.