From cold-water swimming to gardening, the psychological benefits of the great outdoors have inspired a growing genre of books, but can nature improve our mental health?
There is a revealing moment in Isabel Hardman’s book where the author, a political journalist who lives with post-traumatic stress disorder, joins a forest therapy session. The therapist encourages her to “connect” with herself and “experience nature better”. Hardman wanders through the wood and finds a small hornbeam, which is twisting up towards the light, struggling to make its way in the shade of a mature oak. She is attracted to its shape, admires its bark, and draws parallels with her own life: how long it takes to heal and grow, how the scars we gather can still be beautiful “like the zig-zagging trunk of this young tree”. She reaches up and snaps one of its twigs: the tree is dead.
“Serves me right for being so dreadfully whimsical,” Hardman writes. “There seemed to be no neat life lesson here, nothing you’d want to write on a fridge magnet or share on social media. I’d come here hoping to connect with myself, and instead I’d been drawn to a tree that was secretly dead.”
I’m worried it’s become mooted as a kind of panacea – if there’s anything wrong you just go out and look at the flowers
As humans reshape life on Earth, it’s hazardous to pin our wellbeing on the fragments of non-human life that remain
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