by Jane Goodall
Another act of rebellion that I love is the tossing of a “seed bomb” or “green grenade”—which is simply a clay ball mixed with flower seeds that germinate easily. These bombs are thrown up onto embankments, behind railings, and other hard-to-reach places where guerrilla gardeners can’t plant the seeds by hand. When the rain comes, the clay dissolves, the seeds take root, and soon patches of bright flowers bring smiles to closed city faces. At least, that is the idea.
Certainly it works for me. When I am walking through some alien town, I love it when I pass an urban garden and am suddenly gifted with an unexpected scent of lilies of the valley, or the fragrance of roses, or the smell of new-mown grass. Indeed, I always try to detour so as to go through a park, where the light is softened as it filters through the leaves—and instantly my heart is lightened and the world seems a better place. Most people, when I ask them, say they feel the same.
New Gardens for a Changing World
Gardening is changing. Until recently, modern landscaping and gardening was oriented more toward maintaining lawns and decorating beds with flowers and shrubs. In order to keep the grass green and exotic decorative plants alive, gardeners relied on liberal doses of water as well as chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and “weed killers,” such as Roundup.
At one time a young man was paid, one day a week, to help Olly with the garden at The Birches. We did not realize that he was using herbicide on the lawn to get rid of moss and other small weeds, as well as a particularly vicious pesticide to deal with the snails and slugs. When we found out, we were horrified. About six months after we dispensed with his services, we heard, for the first time in several years, the bang, bang, bang of a song thrush smashing open snails against a rock. Gradually other birds reappeared, and now the whole area is protected for conservation and the use of chemicals strongly discouraged.
So many people are concerned about the terrible environmental degradation of our planet, and so often they feel helpless and hopeless in the face of all that is wrong. The most important thing, as I am constantly saying, is to think about small ways in which we can make a difference—every day. And people lucky enough to have gardens can truly make a difference by maintaining the land in an environmentally friendly way.
Right now one of the biggest new gardening trends in the United States is the elimination of fertilizer-dependent and water-draining grass lawns. Instead, gardeners are discovering the joys of creating more environmentally friendly habitats with native trees and plants—those that have been living in the area for hundreds of years and are adapted to the climate.
My botanist friend Robin Kobaly is an advisor to people who want to grow drought-tolerant gardens with native plants in the Southwest. She says that people are especially enthusiastic about native plants when they live in arid areas, but even in other parts of the country, where there’s more rainfall, gardeners are getting sick of the amount of water it takes to keep grass lawns green. At the moment, gardening with drought-tolerant native plants is just a popular eco-conscious trend. But soon, five to six years from now, Robin believes, “it will be imperative for everyone to change how they landscape and garden as the overriding reality of the lack of water becomes apparent.”
This new gardening movement not only reduces water waste but also provides an attractive habitat for the local wildlife. Last month Gombe videographer Bill Wallauer wrote to tell me about how he and his wife, Kristin, were transforming their “typical ridiculous American lawn” into a native plant habitat for bees and other insects and birds and a whole host of small creatures.
Bill put in a stream, a pond, and a wetland for water-loving plant species. He created two areas of high-wildlife-value shrub species, planted numerous coneflower and aster species, and is propagating native grass.
“My favorite spot is our beautiful native-woodland-wildflowers area, which has species like wild ginger, wild leek, and trillium,” he recently wrote to me. So far he has recorded thirty-seven bird species in their “tiny little backyard.”
I have to say that while it may seem small to him after the wilderness of Gombe, it is clearly rather large compared to the postage-stamp-sized gardens that most people have—if they have a garden at all. But even the smallest of gardens can make a difference for the wildlife that is struggling to survive. Almost everyone I meet wants to save wild animals and insects, but they often don’t realize how important it is to preserve the anchors of the wildlife community—the native plants.
In urban areas where the gardens and yards are often small, some communities are joining together to create wildlife havens. There is, for example, the “Pollinator Pathway” in Seattle—where a group of neighbors have transformed the scruffy strips of grass in front of their homes, between the sidewalk and the street, into a mile-long bee-pollinator corridor, planted with native plants that attract and nourish bees.
Other neighborhoods and individual properties are havens for migrating birds. Robin tells her gardening clients, “Think of your garden as a gas station for migrating birds, a place where they can fill up their tanks—they can’t migrate if they don’t have fuel.”
It is exciting to think that our gardens can be part of a growing effort to restore health to our planet. To this end, enormous efforts are also being made by young people all around the world through the Jane Goodall Institute Roots & Shoots program.
Children—The New Garden Warriors
I mentioned Roots & Shoots earlier when I explained how I started the Alligator Club as a child. But let me pause here to explain what Roots & Shoots actually is, and why gardens and gardening play such a large part in many of its programs. R&S is a global movement that encourages young people to become involved in projects that have a positive impact on the world around them. Its most important message is that every individual matters and has a role to play, that each of us makes a difference every day, and that the cumulative result of thousands of millions of even small efforts brings about major change.
It started in 1991 with twelve secondary-school students in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Now, at the start of 2012, there are programs in some 130 countries with around fifteen thousand active groups, involving young people from preschool through university—and beyond, for more and more adults are forming groups.
Hundreds and thousands of these groups can solve many of the problems their elders have created for them. I have seen how it changes the lives of young people, gives them a sense of purpose, rekindles hope.
R&S members are determined to make a difference, prepared to roll up their sleeves and take action, to walk the talk. For the most part, it is the young people themselves who, after discussing local problems, decide what to do to try to solve them. They are asked to choose three projects about which individual group members feel passionate—one to help people, one to help animals, and one to help the environment. The three projects they end up choosing vary depending on the nature of the problems and the age of the members, their culture, whether they are from inner-city or rural environments, and which country they come from. By taking action, seeing the difference they can make, knowing that there are other young people just like them all around the world, the R&S members become empowered, filled with enthusiasm and hope.
A great many of the R&S groups choose to care for their school gardens and learn about plants. In Tanzania, schoolyards that were once made up of dry, trampled dirt are now made beautiful with many trees. They not only provide shade but also hold the soil in place. I especially loved visiting the Tanzanian group that was helping to clear a space in the wilderness by the school to build a library—and one eight-year-old took me to where they had created a similar-sized habitat “for the insects that lost their homes.” Cactus Roots & Shoots Club at Mjimpya Secondary School in Kilimanjaro has a project called Green Mjimpya. To make their school beautiful, they have created various flower gardens grown from seeds they have collected from native plants in the adjacent forest reserve.
In the United States and E
urope, provided the schools give permission, a lot of R&S groups are building wildlife habitats, planting native species, putting up bird nesting boxes, and designing woodpiles for insects. Many Roots & Shoots groups around the world are also creating butterfly gardens. In Taiwan the “Green Thumb” project now persuades as many schools as possible to plant indigenous species of flowering plants, in an effort to restore something of the magic of a country once known as Formosa, “the land of the butterflies.”
The Garden of Eden—Lost?
So far I have not mentioned the Garden of Eden—yet that story is part of my earliest childhood memories, and is certainly one of the best-known and most famous gardens of all for Jews and Christians alike. I used to love to think of Adam and Eve at the dawn of time, before the loss of innocence, and imagine what their garden was like. A place of rich biodiversity, when we humans were part of it all.
Today it seems that this garden represents, symbolically, not just the loss of innocence but the loss of the connection between Man and Mother Nature. As a species we have tried to separate ourselves from the other animals. In our arrogance we have tried to dominate the natural world. Fortunately the Garden of Eden has not yet been utterly destroyed.
Let us, symbolically, work together to restore harmony to that garden. Let us strive to replant everything that, over the ages, we have destroyed as a result of greed and ignorance, poverty and apathy. But we had better not plant another apple tree there!
PART THREE
Uses and Abuses of Plants
Chapter 10
Plants That Can Heal
Part of our TACARE mission in Gombe is to learn about and protect the knowledge of the traditional healers. Recently I visited Mzee Yusuph Rubondo in his tiny house, and he told me that before he became a healer, he had learned about witchcraft. He said this was probably why he has become an expert in curing patients who have been “bewitched.” (CREDIT: © THE JANE GOODALL INSTITUTE–TANZANIA / BY DR. SHADRACK M. KAMENYA)
Many of the medicines my sister and I were given as children were based directly on ancient folk wisdom passed down, often orally, by those who were knowledgeable about the healing properties of different plants. They had wonderful names, our medicines—witch hazel, slippery elm, syrup of figs, friar’s balsam, dill water. Unfortunately, the taste of these plant extracts was usually not as delightful as their names implied—but my grandmother, Danny, was implacable, and as she stood over us, spoon in hand, we had no choice but to “open wide” and swallow the revolting stuff.
One of Danny’s favorites was Squill and Tilleul—which I always thought of as “Squills and Tooloo.” It was a disgusting cough medicine made, I have now discovered, from the resin of Tolu (Myroxylon balsamum), a tree native to North, Central, and South America, that acts as an expectorant, and from the bulb of squill, Urginea maritima, a Eurasian and African plant. No wonder I hated the stuff—squill is also used to make rat poison!
Gradually these old remedies went out of fashion, but now some of them are once again back on the shelves as herbal and holistic medicine in the United States and across Europe. This is not always good news—some of them have been shown to be harmful. Even so, herbal medicine seems to be a growing and highly lucrative market worldwide. In western Europe herbal medicine sales were five billion dollars in 2003–2004, according to the World Health Organization. In other parts of the world where traditional medicine is the primary form of health care—particularly in many countries of Africa and Asia—herbal remedies are especially popular. In China, herbal medicine sales were as high as fourteen billion dollars in 2005.
Healers of the Waha Tribe
Part of the Jane Goodall Institute’s TACARE (“Take Care”) program in Tanzania is devoted to learning about the local traditional medicines, mostly by talking with the indigenous healers, or traditional medicine practitioners, as they are often called.
I was fascinated by this aspect from the start, as were Emmanuel Mtiti, director of TACARE, and Aristides Kashula, our forester. Kashula was the first of our team who began traveling to different villages to talk to the medicine men and women. And although it often was not easy, he gradually won their confidence and eventually they began to share their knowledge.
This was important—more and more of the medicinal plants were becoming highly endangered due to habitat destruction, and knowledge of their uses was also disappearing as the old traditional healers died and youth, for the most part, was scornful of the old ways. So we wanted to try to protect, cultivate, and learn about that wisdom before it was too late. We have now been able to work with a total of eighty-six medicine men and women, all of whom stated that almost every plant has some kind of healing power. The medicine may be contained in leaf, flower, seeds, pith, root, or bark, or some combination thereof. It would take a long time to make a complete “herbal” of local medicinal plants—indeed, it would be almost impossible, for different healers use plants in different ways, to cure different diseases.
In February 2012, I went with Shadrack Kamenya, a member of our Gombe research team, to meet with two of these healers in their homes. These days only a few of the very oldest women still wear the traditional clothing of the past—the two men I met with were dressed in normal Western-style shirts and trousers. And although their parents had spoken only the local Kiha language, these men spoke Kiswahili, the national language of Tanzania, as well.
First we visited with Mzee (the respectful form of address for an elder) Mikidadi Almasi Mfumya of Bubango Village. We sat on low stools just inside the door to the tiny living room (only about six feet by five feet) of the house (itself only a little more than thirteen feet square) where he lives with his family. He told us he was now sixty-five years old and that many of the plants he knew as a young man had disappeared along with the destruction of the forests around his village.
He had a large collection of jars and pots and gourds for mixing and storing his remedies. Many of them, he explained proudly, had been handed down from his grandmother. He picked up one or two of the wooden bowls to show us, handling them with reverence and respect. It was from his grandmother, he said, that his own mother had learned the skills that she had passed on to him.
What he is best known for, Mzee Mikidadi told us, is treating snakebites. He uses ground-up leaves that he buys from the Wabembe, the indigenous people of eastern Congo, many of whom have settled in the Kigoma region. I asked him if he had cured a lot of people and he assured me that they almost always recovered if they got to him soon enough. And he was sure his mother was still helping. “Her spirit talks to me,” he said, “and so I know when patients are coming and can have all the medicine ready when they arrive.”
Mzee Mikidadi took us around his little plot at the back of the house where he is now growing his own medicines. Trees and plants thrived in a riot of green leaves, gnarled trunks, and tangling vines. He showed us one young ntuligwa tree, known to some as “governor’s plum” (Flacourtia indica), growing on a termite mound. He had had to get it from some distance away, since all such trees have vanished from his area. Traditional wisdom maintains that the medicine is always most effective if the leaves from which it is made are picked from trees that are growing on a termite mound.
I was fascinated to hear that Mzee Mikidadi always talks to a plant, asking it for permission, before using it for medicine. “I always leave a gift,” he told us, “an offering for the spirit of the plant. And then I return to take what I need.” I have been told exactly the same by a First Nation healer, who speaks to his plants and leaves them gifts of tobacco.
We said good-bye to Mikidadi and drove to Chankele Village to talk with Mzee Yusuph Rubondo, a well-respected elder who thinks—but has no way of knowing for certain—that he is eighty-five years old. When he started practicing as a young man, there were, he said, many chimpanzees in the thick forest all around his village. And all the medicinal plants were present as well. He told us he had acquired his knowledge from his mother and father, both
of whom were healers: his mother had learned from her father, but his father had learned from a man who was not closely related at all.
We followed him into his house (also very small—the whole structure no bigger than twenty-by-twenty-two feet), and I sat with him on a rush mat laid out on the earth floor at one end of the living room. It was somehow mysterious in there, dimly lit by the light that came in through the one very small window. Arranged neatly on the ground beside him was a fascinating collection of little jars and bottles, most of them carefully wrapped in plastic bags. This was his “drugstore” of powders, dry leaves, seeds, and so on that he uses to treat a whole host of different medical conditions, ranging from toothache to coughs, from rheumatism to fevers.
He had started off, he said, learning about witchcraft—and perhaps that was what had helped him to become an expert in curing patients who had been “bewitched,” as he called it. I asked him if he saw many such people, and what their symptoms were.
There were many, he said. Some arrive lethargic and dull. Others are shouting and screaming, occasionally trying to take off their clothes, and then he needs help to restrain them and hold them down, before he can treat them.
The medicine he uses comes from a plant that he dries and grinds into a powder. He called it kikali, but it may be that he was simply using the Kiswahili word to indicate that it was strong medicine. He took the lid from a container made from a small round polished gourd, chestnut brown in the dim light, and showed me a pale gray-brown powder. Then, taking a pinch, he demonstrated how he treated a patient by rubbing it into his own arm. After that, with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes, he did the same to me!