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Jane Goodall Reveals Her Lifelong Fascination With…Plants?
After studying chimpanzees for decades, the celebrated scientist turns her penetrating gaze on another life-form
- By Jane Goodall
- Smithsonian magazine, March 2013
Goodall’s travels have often brought her face to face with exotic
plants. In Cambodia, she was “awestruck” by the giant roots of an
ancient strangler fig she found embracing the Ta Prohm temple at Angkor
Wat. (Ignacio Ayestaran / Flickr / Getty Images)
From my window, as I write in my house in Bournemouth, England, I
can see the trees I used to climb as a child. Up in the branches of one
of them, a beech tree, I would read about Doctor Dolittle and Tarzan,
and dream about the time when I, too, would live in the forest. I spent
hours in that tree, perched in my special place. I had a little basket
on the end of a long piece of string that was tied to my branch: I would
load it before I climbed, then haul up the contents—a book, a saved
piece of cake, sometimes my homework. I talked to “Beech,” telling him
my secrets. I often placed my hands or my cheek against the slightly
rough texture of his bark. And how I loved the sound of his leaves in
summertime: the gentle whispering as the breeze played with them, the
joyous abandoned dancing and rustling as the breeze quickened, and the
wild tossing and swishing sounds, for which I have no words, when the
wind was strong and the branches swayed. And I was part of it all.
Growing up in this idyllic home and landscape of England was the foundation of my lifelong love of the plant kingdom and the natural world. The other day, when I was looking through a box of childhood treasures that had been lovingly preserved by my mother, I came across a “Nature Notebook,” in which the 12-year-old Jane, with great attention to detail, had sketched and painted a number of local plants and flowers. Beside each drawing or watercolor I had handwritten a detailed description of the plant, based on my careful observations and probably a bit of book research. This was not a schoolbook. This wasn’t done for an assignment. I just loved to draw and paint and write about the plant world.
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’ 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 Lothlórien, the enchanted forest of the elves.
And so I write now 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.
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 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.
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, 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 in 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 that which is twice as saline as the ocean. Some mangrove trees 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.
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 100 acres in Utah and has been there, we are told, for 80,000 to one million years! The multiple stems of this colony (meaning the tree trunks) age and die but new ones keep coming up. It is the roots that are so ancient.
Leaves
The variety of leaves seems almost infinite. They are typically green from the chlorophyll that captures sunlight, and many are large and flat so as to catch the maximum amount. Indeed, some tropical leaves are so huge that people use them for umbrellas—and they are very effective, as I discovered during an aboriginal ceremony in Taiwan, when we were caught in a tropical downpour.
Orangutans have also learned to use large leaves during heavy rain. My favorite story concerns an infant, who was rescued from a poacher and was being looked after in a sanctuary. During one rainstorm she was sitting under the shelter provided but, after staring out, rushed into the rain, picked a huge leaf, and ran back to hold it over herself as she sat in the dry shelter.
Some leaves are delicate, some are tough and armed with prickles, yet others are long and stiff like needles. The often-vicious spines of the cactus are actually modified leaves—in these plants it is the stems that capture the energy from the sun. I used to think that the brilliant red of the poinsettia and the varied colors of bougainvillea were flowers, but, of course, they are leaves adapted to attract pollinating insects to the very small, insignificant-looking flowers in the center.
And then there are the most extraordinary leaves of that bizarre plant Welwitschia mirabilis. Each plant has only two leaves. They look like quite ordinary, long-shaped leaves on young plants, but they continue to grow, those exact same two leaves, for as long as the plant lives. Which may be more than 1,000 years. The Welwitschia was first discovered in Africa’s Namib Desert by Dr. Friedrich Welwitsch in 1859 and it is said that he fell to his knees and stared and stared, in silence. He sent a specimen to Sir Joseph Hooker, at Kew botanical gardens in London—and Sir Joseph for several months became obsessed with it, devoting hours at a time to studying, writing about and lecturing about the botanical oddity. It is, indeed, one of the most amazing plants on Earth, a living fossil, a relict of the cone-bearing plants that dominated the world during the Jurassic period. Imagine—this gangly plant, which Charles Darwin called “the duckbill of the vegetable kingdom,” has survived as a species, unchanged, for 135 million to 205 million years. Originally, its habitat was lush, moist forest, yet it has now adapted to a very different environment—the harsh Namib of southern Africa.
Growing up in this idyllic home and landscape of England was the foundation of my lifelong love of the plant kingdom and the natural world. The other day, when I was looking through a box of childhood treasures that had been lovingly preserved by my mother, I came across a “Nature Notebook,” in which the 12-year-old Jane, with great attention to detail, had sketched and painted a number of local plants and flowers. Beside each drawing or watercolor I had handwritten a detailed description of the plant, based on my careful observations and probably a bit of book research. This was not a schoolbook. This wasn’t done for an assignment. I just loved to draw and paint and write about the plant world.
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’ 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 Lothlórien, the enchanted forest of the elves.
And so I write now 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.
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 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.
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, 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 in 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 that which is twice as saline as the ocean. Some mangrove trees 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.
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 100 acres in Utah and has been there, we are told, for 80,000 to one million years! The multiple stems of this colony (meaning the tree trunks) age and die but new ones keep coming up. It is the roots that are so ancient.
Leaves
The variety of leaves seems almost infinite. They are typically green from the chlorophyll that captures sunlight, and many are large and flat so as to catch the maximum amount. Indeed, some tropical leaves are so huge that people use them for umbrellas—and they are very effective, as I discovered during an aboriginal ceremony in Taiwan, when we were caught in a tropical downpour.
Orangutans have also learned to use large leaves during heavy rain. My favorite story concerns an infant, who was rescued from a poacher and was being looked after in a sanctuary. During one rainstorm she was sitting under the shelter provided but, after staring out, rushed into the rain, picked a huge leaf, and ran back to hold it over herself as she sat in the dry shelter.
Some leaves are delicate, some are tough and armed with prickles, yet others are long and stiff like needles. The often-vicious spines of the cactus are actually modified leaves—in these plants it is the stems that capture the energy from the sun. I used to think that the brilliant red of the poinsettia and the varied colors of bougainvillea were flowers, but, of course, they are leaves adapted to attract pollinating insects to the very small, insignificant-looking flowers in the center.
And then there are the most extraordinary leaves of that bizarre plant Welwitschia mirabilis. Each plant has only two leaves. They look like quite ordinary, long-shaped leaves on young plants, but they continue to grow, those exact same two leaves, for as long as the plant lives. Which may be more than 1,000 years. The Welwitschia was first discovered in Africa’s Namib Desert by Dr. Friedrich Welwitsch in 1859 and it is said that he fell to his knees and stared and stared, in silence. He sent a specimen to Sir Joseph Hooker, at Kew botanical gardens in London—and Sir Joseph for several months became obsessed with it, devoting hours at a time to studying, writing about and lecturing about the botanical oddity. It is, indeed, one of the most amazing plants on Earth, a living fossil, a relict of the cone-bearing plants that dominated the world during the Jurassic period. Imagine—this gangly plant, which Charles Darwin called “the duckbill of the vegetable kingdom,” has survived as a species, unchanged, for 135 million to 205 million years. Originally, its habitat was lush, moist forest, yet it has now adapted to a very different environment—the harsh Namib of southern Africa.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Jane-Goodall-Reveals-Her-Lifelong-Fascination-With-Plants-192136911.html#ixzz2MUyJmmNT
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