We visit Grizedale Forest, Cumbria, in mid-February: a rare silver-bright day of winter, where the rain has subdued and green is shooting up through piles of damp leaves. The undulating gravel path leads us through a corridor of coniferous trees – Scots pines, yews, Norwegian spruces – which stand shoulder to shoulder as if guarding a secret, branches dripping in lush moss curtains. Some trees are uprooted after recent storms, moss and fungi already claiming their skeletons, while the deciduous trees stand naked: waiting for spring. The forest is particularly still, the air sticky sweet with sap and woodchip, and we don’t speak much as we hike. We pass spikes of Juniper haircap moss, sprouting bilberry bushes, bluebell leaves carefully stretching out. All we have to do is walk, to feel muscle and ligament pulling against bone, as pine needles crunch underfoot and streams amble past, as we push through bog and over hills, until we reach the trig point, lungs heaving, and gawp at the view. Nature does not ask anything of us but respect, and in return it can offer total peace. Or perhaps, in the case of a storm’s wildness, perspective.
I doubt I’m alone in finding it difficult to relax, in embodying stress like a second skin. But the green labyrinth of forest is an environment where I shed that skin and feel a little lighter, if only for a few hours. Nature’s positive impact on well-being is an inescapable cliché; for anyone struggling with poor mental health, it is sometimes annoying – even patronising – to be advised to get some fresh air. Yet, it’s a concept supported by in-depth research illustrating the natural world’s healing influence – in fact, mental health charity Mind outlines an extensive list of benefits on its website, such as increasing self-esteem, reducing stress, easing loneliness, and improving mood.1
After walking through a slowly awakening Grizedale Forest, I wonder if this therapeutic effect is partly due to nature’s tempo. In Wintering, Katherine May explores the darker times in life when we need to recover, or ‘winter’, and how we struggle to allow ourselves that rest. She notes: “Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in summer.”2 Hedgehogs and dormice hibernate; trees shed their leaves; dormant bulbs wait under frosted soils. The forest moves at its own pace: trees only grow about an inch in trunk circumference each year, ferns unfurl to their own schedules.3 The majestic English oak tree does not produce acorns until it is 40 years old,
1 Nature and mental health (2021), Mind
<https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/tips-for-everyday-living/nature-and-mental-health> [accessed 1 May 2024].
2 Katherine May, Wintering: The power of rest and retreat in difficult times (London: Rider, 2020), p.13.
3 Max Adams, The Wisdom of Trees (London: Head of Zeus, 2014), p.208.
and after 300 years of work, it takes another 300 to rest.4 The forest takes the time it needs, adapting intuitively through the seasons, not expecting of itself any more than is natural. As May says, the natural world accepts winter’s shorter days, its bitter darkness, and slows its tempo appropriately. Nature does not rush.
In years past, humans have danced to these same seasonal rhythms: families readying for winter by pickling vegetables, salting meats, preserving summer’s bounty in jams and chutneys; farmers stocking up hay, silage, and straw for their animals before late-autumn rain; herbalists foraging for what is in season. In The Wisdom of Trees, Max Adams highlights the mutually beneficial act of coppicing – cutting down trees at their base to promote regrowth – as an example of humans working harmoniously with their environment since the Stone Age: “The ancient partnership between woodsman and trees creates an almost perfectly sustainable use for land.”5 We can use the cut wood for timber, to keep warm, or to hew tools and furniture, while the trees rapidly regrow and the forest habitat still thrives. Living alongside nature isn’t just beneficial for our mental health; it is crucial for the environment too. For three years, Adams lived in the woods, choosing to surrender entirely to the wild, abandoning the luxuries of electricity, warm running water, and a private bathroom. To me, his experience – while surely not always easy – denotes peace and is a pace of living closely attuned to our ancestors. He says: “Woodland life is lived at a pace that adopts the rhythms of wind and rain, sun and moon, spring and autumn. For three years I knew exactly what phase of the moon it was, took the state of the wind and the sky as our weather forecast just as any sailor does.” 6
It is a shame modern society diverges from this pace. After our hike, we return to the daily rush of work, responsibilities, and chores: a societal membrane humans have functioned within for centuries, albeit with cultural differences and changing priorities. Depending on our personal situations, most of us must follow this structure to earn money, feed ourselves, and guarantee shelter – total surrender to the wild is not practical or feasible for everyone. Relaxing in a forest’s peace can therefore seem futile because it always has to end, to be interrupted by relentless commuter traffic and deadlines in twenty-four hours’ time. Our rushed modern living is unnaturally constructed around nature – built on winning, earning, climbing, demands – instead of leaning into the seasons, allowing time for winter, for shedding and sowing. Can a simple twenty-minute walk make any difference when our lifestyles are irreparably out of time?
4 Rachel Hoskins, Life Cycle of a Tree: How Do Trees Grow (2019), Woodland Trust
<https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/blog/2019/06/tree-lifecycle/> [accessed 12 May 2024].
5 What is coppicing? ([n.d.]), The National Trust
<https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/discover/nature/trees-plants/what-is-coppicing> [accessed 17 May 2024]; Adams, p.59.
6 Adams, p.100.
Before electricity, working hours were predominantly dictated by sunlight – especially true for rural occupations, where crops were harvested on long summer days, and winter evenings were mostly spent indoors by candlelight. Today, most of our work routines ignore the shorter days. In winter, we leave the house in darkness and trudge home to the same inky sky, glimpsing sunlight on our lunch break if we’re lucky. But natural light is crucial for our health: we need it for Vitamin D absorption, and it can also combat low mood, sometimes diagnosed as Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).7 According to the NHS, SAD is a type of depression triggered by reduced sunlight exposure in winter months, which affects hormone levels (increasing melatonin and decreasing serotonin, resulting in sleepiness and low mood) and – most interestingly – interrupts the body’s natural circadian rhythm. Our bodies use sunlight to ‘time various important functions’, so without it, our body clocks are disrupted.8 The disruption may simply be due to shorter days and may have affected our ancestors just the same, but is it worsened by our work schedules? Is SAD a signal that we are intrinsically connected to the landscape around us, to the turn of the seasons, and that we should be working with rather than against?
In Wintering, May says: “We are instead in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear; a long march from birth to death […]”.9 Perhaps this is the root of it – we are taught to walk a predetermined path, instead of making space for natural ebb and flow. But the Pagan community follows a different template, with its yearly wheel of eight festivals. Each festival is a marker of time borne from natural rhythms. Some, like Samhain (Halloween) and Beltane (May Day), have Celtic origins, while the solstices and equinoxes are forged to the sun’s celestial movements.10 Through this Wheel of the Year, Pagan rituals embody nature’s cycle, accepting the path to be ever-changing like the tides, celebrating each unique time of year. I wonder if this provides relief from modern boundaries: are Pagans more in tune with their bodies, readily able to find peace? Some may shun these festivals, but I find the idea of them reaffirming – nature can impact us spiritually too.
My curiosity about marking natural cycles in this way stems from a rural upbringing. To quote Raynor Winn in The Salt Path: “I’m a […] farmer’s daughter; the land’s in my bones.”11 As a child, life was punctuated by the seasons: cows turned out onto dry spring ground; battling
7 BBC, The mental health benefits of nature with Dr Julie Smith, online video, YouTube, 14 February 2022
< https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CL-jYOndc-4> [accessed 1 May 2024].
8 Overview – Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) (2022), NHS
<https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/seasonal-affective-disorder-sad/overview/> [accessed 12 May 2024].
9 May, p.78.
10 James Brigden, The Wheel of the Year: The Calendar of Pagan Festivals Explained ([n.d.]), Sky History
<https://www.history.co.uk/articles/the-wheel-of-the-year> [accessed 18 May 2024].
11 Raynor Winn, The Salt Path (London: Penguin, 2019), p.114.
against frozen pipes; bringing ice lollies to everyone enduring relentless hours of summer work; threats of storms and resulting power cuts; having to wait for nature, abide by it, fix because of it. I observed the sycamore outside my bedroom window morphing from bud to leaf to gold to bare. I let ladybirds and beetles scuttle over my knuckles, poked sticky tree trunk sap, scouted for wildflowers with Nanna, spotted owls with Dad, read by the pond with rushes whispering in wind, convinced myself I’d made friends with a robin like Mary in The Secret Garden. I was taught to respect nature’s rhythms, to be kind, to ‘let the wildness in’.12 You cannot erase someone’s rurality – it clings to them like moss to ancient trees.
Yet, rural roots are not compulsory for such a connection; they are just one type of natural education. In The Salt Path, Raynor Winn and her husband, Moth, become ‘salted’ by their unbound relationship to the South West Coast Path at a time when they are lost, homeless, and facing a terminal diagnosis – the landscape reshapes them.13
Although they also had a rural background, there are countless matching stories of travellers, wanderers, and hikers, who are profoundly changed by their journeys through new – and often extreme – environments. Adams says we have an ‘ancient partnership’ with trees, and such experiences illuminate how this extends to all of nature; people intrinsically connect to it, regardless of background.14 In nature, we can be everywhere and nowhere all at once, our imagination can wander unfettered. I think it is natural, maybe even necessary, to be shaped by it.
But sometimes I have forgotten this. I spent three years living in London, craving a lost connection to the countryside, but never actively seeking it. I fractured my connection. Our partnership with the earth – I have learnt through my own behaviours – is inconstant, and the scars are starting to show.
We walk a short loop around Sizergh estate, near Kendal, in early spring. The air chimes with birdsong – blackbird, wren, chiffchaff – and bleats of newborn lambs; it is infused with wild garlic and yesterday’s rain. Slender hazel saplings line a meandering stream, buds just forming, and wildflowers speckle the woodland floor: buttery celandine, mauve dog violets, yellow primrose, delicate wood anemone. Two months on, and bluebells – which we saw as sprouting leaves in Grizedale Forest – are now in flower, the hue of summer dusk. Sizergh has medieval origins and has been home to the Strickland family for over 800 years, once thought to have
12 Winn, p.114.
13 Winn, p.193.
14 Adams, p.59.
accommodated Henry VIII’s sixth wife Catherine Parr.15 Sometime in the 1500s, one of the Stricklands will likely have wandered a similar streamside path and seen the bluebells – although perhaps in corset and skirts instead of hiking gear. Nature is an umbilical cord to our past, our ancestors.
But it’s disconcerting that some flowers, like daffodils, have been premature this year, and blossom has bloomed four weeks early due to warmer weather – yet another reminder of the havoc wreaked by climate change.16 Disasters like wildfires, droughts, and floods, are already warning us that we need to act, but helplessness against a frightening future is causing rising eco-anxiety. Many of us might feel our small personal efforts – recycling, making eco-aware purchases, planting flowers for the bees, cycling to work – don’t make any difference. We might blame ourselves for not doing more, for not paying enough attention while day-to-day stress and responsibility take precedence. But noticing changes like early blossom and educating ourselves about it is still constructive, because it is paying attention to nature’s heartbeat and caring about its health. Only by listening can we learn how to help. We can also notice and support the incredible work undertaken by charities and individuals towards the environment’s recovery. In the UK, The National Trust is aiming to ‘bring blossom back’ and reinstate a vibrant natural habitat by planting four million blossom trees, and I regularly spot newly planted saplings or hedgerows in woodland, beside main roads, and on farmland.17 There are people noticing and acting on it – I’d like to be one of those people.
As we walk, I snap photos of the wildflowers, later discovering they are indicators of ancient woodland – a habitat The Woodland Trust says covers merely 2.5% of the UK.18 With history and folklore woven into the ancient cloth of these woods, it feels magical to have stepped through a pocket of it, but I worry if taking photos was connecting to my surroundings or overlooking their complexity. Thousands of social media accounts are devoted to the outdoors, hiking, foraging, or the woodland aesthetic, with beautiful and often educational content. Time is poured into creating these reels; it is perhaps a unique form of attention, like capturing detail in a sketchbook. Before influencers, artists like Beatrix Potter and the Brontës captured the minutiae of the wild in intricate painted studies. Last year, I visited ‘The Brontës and the Wild’ exhibition
15 Sizergh ([n.d.]), The National Trust <https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/lake-district/sizergh> [accessed 18 May 2024]; Katherine Parr: Where She Lived (2014), Tudor Times
<https://tudortimes.co.uk/people/katherine-parr-where-she-lived/> [accessed 18 May 2024].
16 Ben Rich, Winter warmth brings early blossom across the UK (2024), BBC
<https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/features/68479700> [accessed 1 May 2024].
17 How we’re bringing blossom back ([n.d.]), National Trust
<https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/our-cause/nature-climate/nature-conservation/how-were-bringing-blossom-back> [accessed 1 May 2024].
18 Ancient Woodland ([n.d.]), Woodland Trust
<https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/trees-woods-and-wildlife/habitats/ancient-woodland/> [accessed 1 May 2024].
at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth, and observed some of these astounding botanical drawings – such precise attention to each subject, which undoubtedly took hours. In contrast, a photo takes seconds: are social media posts the same form of observation or less? How connected can we be if we only experience nature through a lens? Perhaps using technology – something conceivably ‘unnatural’ – to promote the natural is a symptom of disconnect. Yet, I have learnt a great deal about plants through bitesize educational videos (such as on @foraged.by.fern’s Instagram), and that seems to be the power of nature’s online presence: education. It’s a trend that could bring tremendous change, increasing younger generations’ awareness of the environment. I hope that it builds respect, and not just a desire for selfies in a natural beauty spot.
I am not a botanist or a biologist, just a farmer’s daughter holding a magnifying glass, attempting to uncover nature’s secrets – but I believe leaning into natural rhythms could be the path towards true calm and well-being. I deeply admire those who choose to be entangled with the natural world, exploring remote and wild environments, but we don’t all need to follow this path to step to nature’s beat. I think it can be as simple as a gentle woodland ramble, or watching the birds, or growing vegetables, or eating seasonally. As simple as noticing, allowing yourself to fold into winter’s darkness and embrace summer’s sun. Perhaps I will start marking the Wheel of the Year, absorbing the seasons’ flow, and I hope to one day plant a tree as my dad has done on the farm. Because our health and the environment’s health are intrinsically connected; nature is not just our companion, it is also part of us, as Winn says: “I could stand in the wind and I was the wind, the rain, the sea; it was all me, and I was nothing within it.”19 Is our modern estrangement from the natural world therefore responsible for some of our discontent? Connecting with the greenery around us could lead to health and happiness – because if nature is part of us, then following its beat is what we were born to do.
19 Winn, p.185.
