Mama Botanica is going to the rainforest to see where a big part of our houseplants comes from 🌿

Our tropical rainforests are disappearing at a fast pace and together with the trees an enormous biodiversity is being lost. I think it’s important to know where our houseplants initially came from, to see the value of our rainforests and learn more about how we can protect them. In November I’ll travel to Work with Nature project in the Costa Rican rainforest together with my boyfriend Bow, where we’ll live in 93 hectares of adopted rainforest and be volunteers for three weeks.

I love spending time in far away rainforests, but being able to travel is such a luxury and I think we have the responsibility to take care of the ecosystem we live in. So instead of just traveling and ‘consuming’, I have been dreaming about adding value while being in the rainforest. Work with Nature is a Dutch organisation which buys land in Costa Rica to protect and study the rainforest. You might remember them from the Philodendron Hastatum action I did last year; for every plant sold I adopted one tree in the Costa Rican jungle. They protect the forest, plant new trees and work together with locals and researchers to care for the jungle. 

The goal of our visit is to dive deep in the rainforest, experience it in a new way and let you share in it as well. We’ll be filming our experiences and create Stories for Instagram. We’ll share as much as we can while we are there, depending on the internet connection, which isn’t too strong in the area. We’ll film the beautiful rainforest, the projects we’ll be working on for Work with Nature and interview the biologists that are researching the ecosystem within the adopted rainforest.

I’m already dreaming of the big Monsteras we’ll see growing on trees and see so many beautiful plants. I hope to give you a better idea of where our plants initially came from, to see the value of our rainforests and to learn more about how we can protect them. 

And yes, we are flying there, which really isn’t environmentally sound. But we’ll be planting trees, which will grow and bind CO2 for hopefully hundreds of years. And we will contribute to the study of the rainforest and do our best to protect it. Still the flight-shame is high and it probably is the last big flight we’ll make in a long time.

To know more about Work with Nature, watch the video above and learn more about their mission to protect 2.000 hectares of Costa Rican rainforest by reforestation, education and research at their website.

You can also take direct action and adopt a piece of jungle through their campaign website Adopt Rainforest. With each donation of € 2,50, they can buy 1 m2 of rainforest in Costa Rica in order to guarantee it’s protection for years to come.