SEA BEAN STORY – Told by the Bean – extracts by Jane Darke
Pages 2/3
My name is Entada Gigas. Some call me Sea Bean or Sea Heart. Entada means bean in an old language most people have forgotten and Gigas means big. So you see that’s me, Big Bean!
I have travelled a long way in my life.
‘Where did you begin?’ you might ask and I will tell you.
I started my life on the great continent of South America, in a country called Brazil, in the most famous forest in the whole world- The Mighty Amazon Rain Forest.
Pages 5/6
My liana lived in the same tree for many years and grew thick and strong. When that tree was old it fell to the forest floor where ferns and frogs grew on the rotting wood. Children climbed along the twisting stems. It had yellow flowers and insects of the forest drank from them taking yellow dust from flower to flower. Then pods grew, longer than a snake, each holding many beans like me, a ladder of beans which monkeys climbed to pick fruit from the trees.
Pages 19/20
We travelled on.
Whales sang for us.
We met a trigger fish which lived in a milk crate.
We met a violet-sea-snail which blew bubbles and chased purple by-the-wind-sailors which it liked to eat.
We saw great metal boxes fall off ships which passed this way and that.
Pages 31/32
I grew and grew and grew, round and round the warm house and people came to see me and they knew my name.
‘This is a sea bean, also called Entada Gigas’ they said. ‘It has travelled all the way from South America on the Wild Atlantic Ocean.’
So that is what the sea is called, I thought to myself.
The plants here are friendly and interesting to talk to. I have this story which I tell to them and to the insects and to you.
I am proud to be Entada Gigas, Big Bean, traveller of the Wild Atlantic
Ocean.
