Isabella Tree

Speaker 20:01

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

Presenter0:04

Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.

Presenter0:41

My castaway this week is the writer and conservationist Isabella Tree. She started out as a travel journalist, but it was an adventure she undertook at home that would make headlines around the world. In 2002, she and her husband Charlie made a controversial decision to take their hands off the wheel, surrender their 3,500 acre estate to nature and see what happened. Despite bitter opposition, Nnepp Castle Estate in Sussex, just 45 minutes from London, was transformed from conventional farmland into natural wilderness and now boasts a kaleidoscope of purple emperor butterflies, nightingales, turtle doves, nesting peregrine falcons, 13 species of bat and a prize-winning author. Isabella's best-selling book about the project, Wilding, has been hailed as a landmark in nature writing.

Presenter1:31

She says, We just loved the feeling of life rebounding, the noise of the birds and insects, barking foxes, roaring stags. There is a sense that the very ground beneath your feet is coming to life again with worm cast, anthills, dung beetles, fruiting bodies of fungi, moles. You just feel like the land is heaving with life. Isabella Tree, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Thank you very much. So you're 20 years into your rewilding project now. For listeners who have yet to view your online webcam, paint a picture for us. What would we see, smell and feel on arrival? Well, if you come in the spring, you are standing in a landscape that really looks more like the Serengeti because it's this extraordinary thorny scrub interspersed with water meadows, wildflower meadows, and then wandering throughout it all we've got our big free-roaming herbivores, longhorn cattle, Exmore ponies, Tamworth pigs. They're all allowed to go wherever they like, so they're disturbing the landscape, creating this amazing, sort of vibrant

Presenter2:31

As you say, a kaleidoscope of habitats, and then the surround sound birdsong and insects is now so loud that if you stand out there on a May day, you can literally feel it reverberate in your stomach. Two decades in, to what extent do you think the idea of rewilding or wilding is catching on? That this might be a turning point for the way we think about the landscape. It's currently a storyline in the arches. You know, it is. I don't know what Linda Snell's going to make of ragword. It's been astonishing, I think, in that literally in the last couple of years, something's happened. And I don't know whether it's Extinction Rebellion, the Plastics Revolution, whatever it is, there's suddenly a feeling out there, I think, that people want something different, that they know they're missing something in the landscape. They want.

Presenter3:16

Something wilder back, and I think that's really incredibly exciting.

Presenter3:21

The key benefit of rewilding is that it can increase biodiversity in the soil itself. Why is that necessary? We've been abusing our soils across the globe for millennia. I think scientists now are talking about having a hundred harvests left across the globe before we have no topsoil in which to grow anything.

Presenter3:37

We have to move to regenerative farming.

Presenter3:41

If you restore your soils, then your plants are going to be able to take up the nutrients and minerals from those soils. And at the moment, I think, under the sort of industrial systems that we have, you have to eat 10 tomatoes to get the nutrition out of one tomato in the 1950s. I mean, all our food nutrition has plummeted under this sort of chemical system. And obviously, if you can do projects like this, if you can rewild, and you're actually pulling down carbon out of the atmosphere, it's one of the most important tools we have at our disposal to combat climate change. And how has that richness of soil returned? What is it that you've done that's made that happen? Stopping chemical farming, and that's the best start. But it's really being driven by free-roaming animals, the way they disturb the ground, particularly their dung and their urine.

Presenter4:30

We have amazing number of dung beetles because we don't put wormers into the cows, we're not giving them antibiotics. The cowpats are wonderfully organic. And Charlie, my husband, has a bit of a dung beetle fetish and spent a very happy summer counting dung beetles in cow pats on the kitchen table and managed to find 23 different species of dung beetle in a single cow pat. They're pulling that dung back into the soil.

Speaker 14:43

And

Presenter4:56

Enriching it with nutrients and kicking off a dynamic system beneath the soil again. Isabella, we've got so much we want to ask you about today, but of course, we also want to hear your music. So, let's get started. This is your first disc. Well, this is The Whole of the Moon by The Water Boys, and I've loved it ever since it came out. It speaks of inspiration of people who think holistically. This refers to Charlie, my husband. He has a wonderful way of thinking about nature that joins up things in ways I couldn't even begin to. And everyone from Humboldt to Darwin to Einstein, I mean, this speaks of learning about different perceptions of the world.

Isabella Tree5:34

I pictured a rainbow

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You held it in your hands.

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I had flashes.

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She saw the plan, I wandered at it in the world for years.

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While you just stayed in your room

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I saw the crescent

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You saw the whole of the moon.

Presenter6:11

The Hole of the Moon by The Water Boys. So, Isabella Tree, in two thousand two your husband Charlie sent a letter of intent to DEFRA outlining your aim to, I quote, establish a biodiverse wilderness area in the Lower Weal of Sussex. What did you need to do to get started?

Presenter6:29

After the last harvest we just simply let the fields lie fallow. We took up about seventy seven miles of internal fences. We let the ditches silt up and we took out gate posts

Speaker 26:40

Hmm.

Presenter6:40

And then finally when we got funding from high-level stewardship, we deer fenced the whole area so that we could release these free-roaming animals within it. Set a few parameters for us, Isabella. How much difference is there between what you're doing now and conventional conservation or what we might think of as conservation? Well, I think conventional conservation has played a hugely important role. They've really targeted species that we would have lost that would have gone extinct without it. We aren't target-led at all, so I think the idea of rewilding is not the goal, it's the process. So it's allowing free-roaming animals and water systems to manage the landscape for you, to sit back on your hands as a human being, which is very, very difficult for human beings to do.

Speaker 17:23

A human being.

Presenter7:25

But to allow the animals and the the nature that would have been there before human impact to just do its thing and see what happens. I mean very difficult to do that, to sit on your hands in that way. I wonder what the most difficult lessons to learn have been during the the rewilding process. Early on, I think there was a moment when we did begin to lose our nerve. We suddenly had creeping thistle come in over

Presenter7:50

Tens and then hundreds of acres, and it can really colonize fast.

Presenter7:55

And as we'd made this pledge to let nature work itself out, we felt we had to sit on our hands and see what would happen, and it carried on like the day of the Triffids, and of course we had angry letters from the neighbours. And then suddenly, about three or four years in, we woke up one Sunday morning and there were painted lady butterflies, tens of thousands of them, and they were landing on the creeping thistle. So you could stand inside the thistles and close your eyes, and you could hear the sound of the butterflies around you like a waterfall. Amazing.

Presenter8:26

And of course the thistle is the Painted Lady butterfly food source. It's where they lay their eggs and what their caterpillars eat. And this just happened to be a year where there'd been a huge migration from Morocco, and the next year the creeping thistle, the whole thing had disappeared.

Presenter8:42

And it was our first lesson that sitting on your hands works. You have to be a little bit patient, but sooner or later some pathogen, some pest, something will come in to get rid of a monoculture. What about in situations that are perhaps more urgent, longhorn cattle giving birth unattended? As someone who has been a farmer for many years, letting them do that for the first time must have been quite nerve-wracking. That was very odd for us because you always intervene. It's an interventionist system farming livestock.

Presenter9:14

When we walked around and found a calf laid up in a little bed underneath a tree in a ditch somewhere, you know, you thought this can't be right. Should we take it to its mother? But the mother knows exactly where it is, and it waits until the calf is three or four days old, until it then introduces it to the herd, and then there's this amazing moment where they sniff the calf and kind of low and welcome it into the herd.

Presenter9:37

But obviously if there is a problem, then, you know, of course we go in with veterinary attention, but as much as we can we leave them to it. Let's hear some more music. It's time for your second disc.

Presenter9:47

My father played jazz literally from the moment he got up at six in the morning to when he went to bed, and we had wonderful

Presenter9:55

Background music to our childhood, everything from Duke Ellington to Jack Teagarden, but always his favourite was Billie Holiday, so these foolish things has got to be in there.

Isabella Tree10:05

A cigarette that bears a lipstick's traces.

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An airline ticket to Roman tickets

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Still, my heart has wings. These foolish things remind me of the old

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Jing Ming piano in the next department.

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Those stumbling words that told you what my heart meant.

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Fair mouths painted sweet Bish, foolish things remind me of beautiful

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You can

Isabella Tree10:49

You start.

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You conquered me when you did that to me.

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I knew somehow this happened.

Presenter11:09

These Foolish Things by Billy Holiday, taking you back to your childhood Isabella Tree. Was that when your love of the natural world took root too?

Presenter11:17

Yes, it did. I mean, we had a very feral upbringing, I think, you know, the old benign neglect school of upbringing. And I would spend days and days out on my chopper bike with my mates and sometimes my younger sister, and building dens and lighting camp fires, and just this wonderful Swallows and Amazons kind of existence.

Presenter11:37

Perhaps unusually, you knew that you were adopted from an early age. Now, your adoptive parents were Lady Anne Tree and Michael Tree. What did they tell you about your birth?

Presenter11:46

There was never a sort of shock. I'd sort of always knew I was, which I think was very clever of them. And they always put it to us, that, my sister and I, that we were extra special because they'd chosen us. And that did make us feel very special, I think.

Presenter12:00

Your adoptive family was aristocratic, so your mother, Lady Antree Nay Cavendish, was brought up at Chatsworth House. Your aunt was lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret. One of your uncles married Deborah Mitford. Another married Kathleen Kennedy, sister of JFK. Your mother sounds pretty remarkable. She was a campaigner, wasn't she? Yeah, she was astonishing, really. She was very anti-authoritarianism. And she was a prison visitor at Holloway for 20 years or so. And she hit upon this amazing idea of teaching prisoners, particularly lifers, how to sew. And she and some wonderful women from the Royal School of Needlework would go in and teach them how to sew.

Presenter12:38

And ultimately she felt they were producing such beautiful things that really they should be allowed to be paid for them.

Presenter12:45

But the Government didn't see it that way. It took a long, long time, including a letter I think she wrote to the Home Secretary. Some choice language in there.

Speaker 112:51

Some choice.

Speaker 112:53

So I read it.

Presenter12:59

And it was framed and put on the wall, I think, in the Home Office. And eventually it did the trick.

Presenter13:04

What about your father, Michael? What did he do for a living?

Presenter13:07

He was an art dealer for a bit. He was a director of Christie's, but he also was a director of Colfax and Fowler, which is a decorating firm that my grandmother, Nancy Lancaster, had taken on with John Fowler.

Presenter13:20

So he'd grown up in some very, very beautiful houses and loved beautiful things, went through money like a knife through butter, but it was incredibly generous. It's time for your next piece of music. What are we going to hear? Life's a Gas by T-Rex. I had a slightly checkered school career. I think it was looking back on it because I hadn't really acknowledged my adoption and I loved my parents and my sister, but there was in the background this niggling feeling that something wasn't quite right. My father said that I was always looking for the hole in the fence and unfortunately the fence was quite often a school and I ended up getting kicked out of a couple of them. So when I finally got expelled from Canford, which was a sort of boys' public school, it was just too exciting really to last there for too long.

Presenter14:07

My boyfriend at the time sent me this track by T-Rex.

Isabella Tree14:12

I could have loved you, girl, like a planet.

Isabella Tree14:19

I could have changed your heart to a star

Isabella Tree14:26

But it really doesn't matter at all.

Isabella Tree14:30

No, it really doesn't matter at all.

Isabella Tree14:34

Love's a girl

Presenter14:38

Uh

Presenter14:40

T-Rex and Life's a Gas. So, Isabella Tree, I'm going to need a little bit more on that checkered school career of yours. You were expelled twice. Why? Well, I think that the first one was I was at a convent and I was an Anglican in a Catholic school. So I think that was a recipe for disaster. But I felt it very claustrophobic, and I think the nuns were

Presenter15:03

I felt just trying to stamp all sense of joy out of us as children, and I also couldn't understand a religion where I was just asked to believe something unquestioningly.

Presenter15:13

So I used to do, I mean, very annoying things, like genuflect on the wrong knee and do the sign of the cross upside down, and we used to have a Ouija board and try and, you know, speak to people from the other side, you know, the stuff of the devil really, to wind the nuns up. You know, generally being a real pain, I think. And finally, when I was expelled from Canford, that was slightly more dramatic. And my mother rang me up so that I could prepare myself and be dignified when I was sacked, as she put it. And she rang up and said.

Presenter15:45

Um it's curtains, I'm afraid.

Presenter15:51

You said that your rebelliousness was in part due to some anxieties that you'd felt about your adoption. Years later you did trace your birth mother, Geraldine, first via a letter, and then on the phone. I mean, that must have been such a big moment for both of you. How did it go?

Presenter16:08

It was really astonishing, and I remember feeling very guilty to begin with towards my parents. But when I told them that I was going to do this, my mother had obviously prepared herself for this, and she said the most wonderful thing. She said

Presenter16:20

Don't worry about meeting your mother, and I hope you love her. Um it doesn't mean you'll love us any the less. The human heart is the most amazing thing. It can just grow and grow and grow. It has infinite capacity.

Presenter16:32

And that really was such a relief. It made me see it in a completely different way.

Presenter16:37

And when I finally found Geraldine,

Presenter16:40

I thought I would cry or something, but the relief was so enormous that I just laughed, and she laughed, and we laughed and laughed and talked for hours on the phone, and she wanted to know what I looked like, and said it's extraordinary if you had written this letter any later than you did, I would have been abroad.

Presenter16:58

I said, Where are you going? and she said Papua New Guinea and I said, But that's where I'm going next week.

Presenter17:03

So it was really astonishing. But I remember walking down the street literally I know what people mean when you walk on air. That's how it felt. It felt like some burden had been lifted. And from that moment on, that little rebelliousness, that little kind of grit that had been annoying away at me

Presenter17:21

vanished, and I felt settled.

Presenter17:24

And what about your relationship after that? Your mother said, you know, I hope you love her. How does that feel to kind of rebuild a a relationship with your biological mother? It was a little difficult to begin with. She was lovely. She was really lovely. But I think from her point of view, she had been very anxious and been longing to meet me, which was wonderful. So she welcomed me into her house with huge generosity, like I was returning home.

Presenter17:49

But I had this whole other life and family, so it was very difficult for me, I think, to strike that balance. We could be close, but she would never really be my mother.

Presenter17:58

And in the event, actually, Geraldine died very young, in her early fifties, so I never really had a chance to get to know her very well.

Presenter18:07

But her daughter Jamie.

Presenter18:09

has made me godmother to her daughter, who's called Geraldine.

Presenter18:13

And that is the most wonderful feeling because it seems to have joined this circle, mended something. And so I'm godmother of my birth mother's granddaughter. It's amazing. Let's hear some more music. What's it gonna be? The next one is wonderful. It's What's a Telephone Bill by Bootsy and his rubber band. And it reminds me of being a teenager in my husband Charlie's mother's farm. And it was very hippy-ish, I suppose. Amazing people coming to stay, a lot of work on the farm, stone picking, looking after the pigs, a lot of lambing, and then long dinners, arguing about everything under the sun, and then lying on beanbags, a whole gang of us, listening to amazing music.

Presenter18:58

Grab a beanbag. Here we go.

Presenter19:01

Excellent. Yeah.

Isabella Tree19:02

If I seem, I've seen to you, I've seen you.

Isabella Tree19:08

The real end that seems a thing to do.

Isabella Tree19:13

I'm just living and I'm loving, waiting for the moment when you get tired to kill And if I can get your love through what's the telephone bill

Presenter19:30

What a telephone bill by Bootsy's Rubber Band. Isabella Tree, by the time you were ready to go to university, you already wanted to become a writer, but you chose to read classics rather than English as you'd originally intended to. Why was that? It was really the advice of Iris Murdoch. She was a great friend of my uncle David Cecil who used to come to lunch every Sunday. And she was there one day and asked what I wanted to do in the future. And I said, you know, sort of rather shamefacedly in front of this wonderful novelist that I wanted to be a writer. And she said, well, what are you studying at university? And I said, well, English, of course. And she said, there's no, of course, about it. Don't study English. Any fool can read a book. You should be studying classics and then you'll really know how to use language. So that's what I did. And I still had this hankering to read English. But once I got to university and started reading the classics, I absolutely loved it. So she was right. She was absolutely right, yeah. You would go on to become a travel writer with the Evening Standard. Now, intrepid, I don't think that's quite the word. Antarctica, Cambodia, Iran. Was any of the travel hazardous? I don't know if I was ever seriously in any danger. I don't think I'm usually brave. Flying in mission planes in Papua New Guinea was pretty scary over, you know, limestone cast pinnacles and landing on a sixpence in a twin otter with reverse thrust. It's pretty scary. I loved Papua New Guinea particularly. It was really thrilling to see people who could be living.

Speaker 120:45

Over

Presenter20:59

in this incredible landscape, in rainforest, and gardening in this incredibly sophisticated way, and living with pigs, of course, having this amazing symbiotic relationship with pigs.

Presenter21:09

It's time for some more music. Your fifth disc. This is Three Little Birds by Bob Marley. And when I was pregnant with our daughter Nancy, I tested positive for toxoplasmosis. I'd just been to Iran and it looked like I contracted it there. So we had to wait for tests to tell if this pathogen was growing. If it was decreasing, there'd be no problem. But if it was increasing and it probably would be increasing if I caught it in Iran, then something would have happened probably to the fetus. So it was a very, very nerve-wracking moment being pregnant and worrying about the future of this little child.

Presenter21:44

And we were in Indonesia and I couldn't sleep and I was so worried. And Charlie said, Let's just turn the radio on and listen to some music. And it was this track.

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No more.

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Bow to say

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Every

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Be alright.

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And we don't worry

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How do I see?

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Never leave

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Gonna be alright.

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Rise up this morning

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My quick horizon's on

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Really good burner

Presenter22:30

Bob Marley and Three Little Birds, a comforting voice, Isabella Tree, when you were pregnant with your daughter Nancy, who did turn out to be okay.

Presenter22:38

Your husband Charlie inherited NEP in 1987. Now it had belonged to his grandparents. What are your memories of your first visit? In those days the house had hardly been changed since the Second World War, so there were still blackout blinds in the windows. And if you'd flicked a light switch, you would have thrown back off your feet with an electric shock and no central heating, so it's freezing.

Presenter22:59

Charlie initially felt that he could really turn the farm around. And so for 17 years we tried to be the best farmers that we could be. Bigger machinery, more chemicals, different types of crops. We even tried diversifying into ice cream that was poised to go national until the Darth Vader of ice cream, Hagendas, came on the scene and blew us out of the water. Isabella's own views.

Presenter23:25

So by the late nineties you had two children, Nancy and Ned, and and it was increasingly difficult to make a living from farming. What wasn't working?

Presenter23:34

Well, it was our soil really that was up against us, the clay soil, and the fact that you were out of action for six months of the year because you just couldn't get heavy machinery onto the land and you couldn't sow spring crops. Every diversification we tried to do just didn't seem to work. And at the same time, we had to put central heating in, and then we discovered asbestos and all the lagging. You know, I remember just looking at my cereal with these crying children and watching the dust settle into the cereal and just singing, I just don't know if I can cope with much more of this.

Presenter24:06

And it wasn't just your family's future at stake. I mean, there were jobs on the line for those who worked on the estate. Yes, so we had the farm manager who was wonderful and a good farm manager, and we had to make him redundant, and nine other men lost their jobs. It was a very, very black day when we made that decision.

Presenter24:23

But we knew we had to find something else that could keep this very historic estate together.

Presenter24:30

And that process began with a visit from an expert in managing oak trees, Ted Green. What did he tell you? Oh, Ted's amazing. We brought him in to advise us on this big old oak tree. It's about five or six hundred years old.

Presenter24:46

And he saw this wonderful specimen, and he said there's nothing wrong with it. It could go on for another three or four hundred years. But then he turned round and he looked at these lovely oaks in what had been the Repton Park around the house.

Presenter24:58

that we had been merrily plowing right up to the trunks, and Ted says, you know, I can just tell when a friend of mine isn't looking well, and these friends of mine are not looking well.

Presenter25:09

And we said, well, what was it? Was it the drought? Was it, you know, has it been storms? And he said, no, it's what you're doing to the soil underneath. It's the chopping up of the roots, it's the chemicals, and that's why they're looking like that. And suddenly we felt, my God, that this is down to us. These trees that we assumed would be there forever were dying and we were what was causing it.

Presenter25:31

And that was the epiphany, I think, when we realised we've got to change our ways. Time for your sixth disc today, Isabella. Tell us about this one.

Presenter25:40

Well, this is Mozart's clarinet quintet. Our great friend Patrick Kiernan started the Brindisi String Quartet. So this is his recording. Patrick was really one of the reasons that Charlie and I ever met. He introduced us. And this reminds me of the sleepless nights we had when the children were little, the house was dealing with asbestos, the ice cream business was going down the tubes, and we didn't know what was going to happen with the farm. Neither of us could sleep, so we'd play this in the middle of the night.

Presenter27:11

Mozart's clarinet quintet played by the Brindisi String Quartet with Nicholas Carpenter on clarinet. So, Isabella Treat. Obviously at the beginning of this process you and Charlie were passionate about it, full of nerve and full of hope, but many people were horrified by what you were doing. Yes, often I think it's to do with aesthetics. If you're used to looking out on our green and pleasant land, when someone comes along and just lets it go, I think it's not surprising actually that we had the reaction that we did.

Speaker 227:42

Okay.

Presenter27:42

Did you expect it at the time? I think we expected it a little, but I don't think we realized quite how how heated that feeling was going to be. Really the letters were enormous. I mean the numbers of letters and your grandparents would be rolling in their grave.

Presenter27:58

all this kind of thing. But I think we knew enough about what we were doing we could already see species coming back, things like nightingales and turtle doves.

Presenter28:06

Then I think suddenly people began to change and think, oh, well, there is perhaps method in their madness. But also I think it's a question of getting used to it. You're now in a better financial position than when you were farming. You run wildlife safaris, you rent out farm buildings, there's glamping on site. How challenging is it for non-landowners and small farms to make a financial success of wilding? I think it is something that can be scaled down. I think the potential for ecotourism is huge. We're seeing an increase in farm clusters, farms that join together and pull up their boundaries between them to produce a project that could be viable. And what about land value? I mean, reverting arable land to scrub or woodland halves its value, doesn't it, at present? I think we've got to see a change in how we approach that. And the governments of the future, I think, will have to address that and see the value of changing our ways and having scrub back in the landscape, what it does for flood mitigation, soil control, and biodiversity. So perhaps we're putting a financial value on at least land managers need to be rewarded for providing public goods and for acting responsibly with the land.

Speaker 129:08

I

Isabella Tree29:08

Uh

Speaker 129:08

I think so.

Presenter29:17

Why should we, the taxpayers, have to pay higher water bills because the water companies are having to take nitrates and pollutants and soil out of our water?

Presenter29:27

It is owned collectively by us all.

Presenter29:30

You know, the soil, the air, the water, and it needs to be looked after. One of the very sobering meditations in your book about wilding the farm is that if it hadn't been for the financial necessity to take a different approach, you would still be farming conventionally. How does it feel to reflect on that?

Presenter29:50

It is shocking to look back on it. But it's it's it's true. When we were farming the fields were always ploughed, and the plowing would be killing up all the worms and the soil biota and the mycorrhiza fungi, so there was really nothing in those fields at all.

Presenter30:05

We were in a different mindset. And I think it's really important not to denigrate the farmers here because it's not the farmers' fault. You're just doing.

Presenter30:13

The best you can, and you're being driven, incentivized in a particular way, and you're responding to that in the way it was intended.

Presenter30:22

So we just have to change the system.

Presenter30:25

Let's have some more music, Isabella. What's next? This is an extraordinary recording of Nightingales, which was done during the war.

Presenter30:33

And in the middle of the recording you can suddenly hear the sound of Lancaster and Wellington bombers flying overhead. They were on a bombing raid to Mannheim in Germany.

Presenter30:43

And first of all, I hope it will remind me of home. It will remind me of the nightingales that we go out and listen to every May when they come back. But what I love about this is the sound of

Presenter30:54

This valiant, valiant little bird throwing its song to the heavens and trying to compete with the thrum of the bombers as they go over. And somehow it gives me hope that whatever human beings do, nature will try and respond and do its absolute utmost to see it through and to bounce back.

Presenter32:10

A BBC sound recording of Nightingales and Bombers the night of the Mannheim Raid recorded in 1942.

Presenter32:18

Isabella Tree, you're part of a campaign to rewild one percent of the country by twenty thirty. Where are the best opportunities to do that? I think we have to think really big here and think about connectivity, moving rewilding into cities so that people genuinely have access to wild spaces again. And why is that important? I think it's important for all those ecosystem services, the public goods that I've been describing, but it's also important for your mental and physical wellbeing.

Presenter32:47

I think it's something that hadn't really ever occurred to Charlie and I before we started doing this project, but the effect it has on you psychologically is huge. It's that innate desire in all of us to connect with living things. And when you're walking down a water lag on a sunny summer's evening and you hear a turtle dove turturing, it's this kind of sense of joy that takes over you, this sense of kind of completeness. You're suddenly somewhere where life is humming, buzzing all around you. It's where you're meant to be. And what about our listener who is sitting listening to us today, perhaps inspired to make a positive difference? What can they do?

Presenter33:28

All of us can make a difference. We can do amazing things with gardens, connecting your garden with your neighbours, having a hedgehog hole cut in the fence perhaps, allowing nature to control your pests rather than using chemicals. There's time for one more disc to day, Isabella. What are we going to hear?

Presenter33:44

This is Dancing in the Moonlight by Top Loader. My daughter actually both my children are great dancers, but Nancy particularly is a fantastic dancer, and she knows if she wants to get her old mother up and dancing, this is the one that will do it. And I would love to just think of them and be dancing with complete abandon on my sandy beach.

Isabella Tree34:03

We get it almost every night.

Isabella Tree34:08

When that moon is again right, that's a super nature all the night. Everybody dancing in the moonlight.

Isabella Tree34:28

Everybody here is out of sight.

Isabella Tree34:32

They don't bark and they don't bite, they keep their screws to keep it tight Everybody

Presenter34:41

Dancing in the Moonlight by Toploader. So it's time to send you off to your island, Isabella tree. Now, I'm assuming it's going to be a wild one. How do you imagine it?

Presenter34:49

I hope human beings haven't ever stepped there before, and so that the wildlife will be naive and completely unafraid of me. And if a monkey falls out of a tree and breaks its leg or something, maybe I can nurse it and cuddle up with different species when I go to sleep at night. Oh, I hope you get a cuddle monkey, absolutely.

Presenter35:08

I could give you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare to take with you, as well as a book of your choice. What would you like? I would love War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. It's my favourite book, and I think that will sort me out. I could read that several times over and still find wonderful new things in it. You can also have a luxury item. What do you fancy? I'd love a mask and snorkel. I hope it's going to be a coral reef that hasn't been affected by bleaching, and there'll be a wonderful kaleidoscope of fish to look at. But I do get very cold, so could I have kind of like a neoprene vest? Can I have that so I can just stay in the water even longer? I think that's quite a chic outfit. Absolutely. Yeah, thank you very much.

Speaker 135:39

Soon I have that.

Speaker 135:43

Yeah, it's yours.

Presenter35:46

And lastly, if I had to ask you to save just one of your eight discs, which would you like to rescue? I think it would have to be these foolish things with Billy Holiday.

Presenter35:55

Isabella Tree, thank you so much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you very much for having me.

Presenter36:12

I think Isabella will be very happy snorkeling around her island and I particularly like the idea of her finding a monkey to coddle. I mean who doesn't need one of those? I hope you enjoyed our conversation. In the Desert Island Disc's back catalogue there are many guests who share their love and knowledge of nature including horticulturalist Christopher Lloyd, gardening writer Anna Payvord and the naturalist Sir David Attenborough. You can hear all of those programmes on BBC Sounds. In the year 2000 Sue Lawley cast away primatologist Jane Goodall. At the age of 26 she traveled to Gombe National Park on the shores of Lake Tanganika in Tanzania. Sue asked her how quickly she knew this was a place she'd be happy in.

Speaker 236:53

I knew from the moment that I went along the lake shore, looking up at the rugged mountains, that this was going to be a challenge.

Speaker 237:00

but that I was going to just have an amazing, extraordinary adventure. And I couldn't actually believe that it was happening. It was very hard for me to think that this is me and this is really real and not a dream any more. It was where you'd always intended to be. Yes, it was Africa, Africa from the time when I was eleven. It had to be Africa. And, you know, eventually through thick and thin, I got there, and this amazing opportunity came. Can you describe it to me? Describe the place first of all.

Speaker 237:30

Looking from the shores of Lake Tanganika, which is the longest freshwater lake in the world, you look up and the sky's usually blue and there's the mountains at the rift escarpment with the steep forested valleys and the rather more open slopes and peaks in between. And when you get in there, when you walk up the valleys, it's a whole new world of forest with dim light and little flecks of sunlight coming down from the canopy and dancing on the floor and it's quiet and it's it's my idea of heaven on earth. It's your garden of Eden. It's my garden of Eden with bright butterflies and birds calling and little rustles and then the chimpanzees.

Speaker 238:09

How long did it take you to be accepted by them? Were you ever totally accepted?

Speaker 238:15

The chimpanzees at first just ran away. I mean, even if I was on the other side of a valley, a steep-sided valley, they would take one look at this weird white ape and flee. They're very conservative. And it was because I just sat and didn't try and get too close too quickly and wore the same coloured clothes every day and pretended not to be interested in them. You know, eventually they realized, well, she's not as terrifying as we thought. So all those years ago, when was the moment that you knew now they've accepted me?

Speaker 238:45

I think, well there were two moments actually. The first was when I came by accident too close to a group and instead of running away they looked at me and went on grooming and one of the chimps in that group was David Greybeard who lost his fear before all the others. And the moment that I can never forget was when I was following him and I thought I'd lost him. I was pushing through these thorny undergrowth and there he was sitting by a little stream and near him was a ripe red palm nut. So I picked up that nut because they love them and held it out to him and he looked deeply into my eyes and he took that nut and dropped it. But at the same time while he still looked in my eyes he gave this gentle reassurance, the squeezing of his fingers on my hand and it was like going back into the distant mists of the past to a language which our ancient common ancestors must have.

Presenter39:38

Used. A remarkable encounter Jane Goodall speaking to Sue Lawley in 2000.

Presenter39:44

Next time on Desert Island Discs, I'll be casting away the director of the documentaries Senna, Amy and Diego Maradona, Asif Capardia. Do join us then.

Speaker 140:10

Hi everybody, I'm Caitlin Jenner and I am a guest on Simon Monday's Don't Tell Me the Score podcast. We talked about everything, the Olympics, trans issues, and all the lessons that I have learned along the way. I really enjoyed recording the podcast and I hope you enjoy listening to it. You can hear it on BBC Sounds. Just search for Don't Tell Me the Score.