Ancient trees and the healing power of nature
Extract from Luke Barley's new book...
This edition of Tree Talk features an extract from Luke Barley’s new book, Ancient: Reviving the Woods that Made Britain. In his book, forester Luke explores our ancient woodland – from the Lakes to the Peak District, by way of suburban London's hidden gems – and reveals what we stand to gain, as individuals and as a society, by rekindling our ancient connection with these special places.
“I felt the increasing benefit of time spent working in nature throughout my career as a ranger. But it was at its most powerful after I was flattened playing football while I was working in the White Peak in Derbyshire. I went up for a header and, to everyone’s surprise, won it. My opponent, arriving a second late, instead headed me in the face, fracturing my eye socket and causing a severe concussion that lasted months and had me ticking off a checklist of head injury symptoms as they came and went. One day I might feel nauseous and low, the next euphoric but completely forgetful. My weight plummeted, which I attributed to the amount of energy my body was using simply to heal my brain.
The rollercoaster settled down over weeks into the worst depression I’ve ever felt, anxiety, and a combination of amnesia and brain fog that left me in tears after a couple of meetings when I returned to work – much too soon, with hindsight. One of the challenges with a brain injury is that it’s invisible, and it proved almost impossible for the doctors to assess accurately how I was feeling or how things were progressing – and, having been knocked senseless, I wasn’t in a position to judge or explain either. Staying at home in a dark room, as I’d been advised to do, didn’t help, as boredom and loneliness made the anxiety almost unmanageable.
Fortunately, the White Peak rangers had a long, overgrown hedge to lay on farmland near Dovedale that winter, and in kneeling at my section in companionable silence with the others down the line I found the most effective salve for my shaken brain. My mind could turn at its leisure while I swung my billhook into the backs of gnarly hawthorns until they folded gently and satisfyingly over with a strip of bright wood exposed. The steady pace, the effort in relatively mindless action and my immersion in the microcosm at the bottom of the hedge, with its varied textures and soothing shades – as well as a sociable robin – seemed to sand the edges off the jagged, physical sensations of anxiety and left me feeling more at peace than I had since the accident.
I had, I realised, observed the calming, sustaining power of outdoor work in other people without having understood quite how potent it could be. As a trainee ranger in Cheshire, I worked for weeks with a group of teenage boys who’d been excluded from school and were threatened with youth detention; the Prince’s Trust put together a last-chance programme of activity for them that included practical conservation work. They were, predictably, a wild bunch, led by an ex-marine who fought them each lunchtime, ten on one, to help them let off steam. While it didn’t work for all of them, some of the boys settled quickly into the work, cutting rhododendron or digging cobbled drains into paths, the intensely physical labour absorbing their abundant energy and the rich, novel surroundings delighting them. Lots of people, of course, simply aren’t cut out for academic work, and I’ve seen time and again with young volunteers those who don’t get on so well with school gaining confidence by doing practical tasks well and enjoying it.
And the same can be true of adults. When I worked at Dunham Massey the rangers formed a partnership with Mind, the mental health charity, who prescribed volunteering on conservation projects for people who hadn’t been able to work in years due to struggles with their mental health. Again, of course the impact wasn’t universal, but some of the people who came out with us found a new sense of purpose or calm by discovering the solace and satisfaction of using their hands outdoors.
The powerful positive impact of simply spending time in the woods is becoming increasingly mainstream. The Japanese concept of shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing, for instance, is now widely known and, while some have suggested that it just puts a label on what many people with an interest in nature have long understood, the research that has accompanied it provides fascinating concrete examples of its various effects.
Phenolic compounds that trees produce to inhibit their own pathogens have long been used to help develop human medicine – salicin from willow bark, famously, is synthesised for aspirin – but there’s increasing evidence that even regularly inhaling certain compounds by spending time beneath the trees can reduce the chances of people developing illnesses. Another study demonstrated that an intensive three-day forest bathing course improved immune system function in people where it was previously weakened, and that the effects lasted at least a week, and in some cases as long as a month. Spending time in the woods has been proven to reduce blood pressure and cortisol, the stress hormone, and the positive impact on mental health, already trusted instinctively by many people, has been quantified and recommendations developed to maximise its effectiveness.
Although there are fewer – if any – studies specifically on the wellbeing of woodland workers, I feel sure that the benefits are multiplied. As I’ve experienced, woodlanders are subject not only to the life-enhancing effects of time spent in nature but also the benefits of doing work that is practical and meaningful, both of which have independently been shown to be good for us. It shouldn’t really be a surprise; humans evolved in a woody landscape, as we’ve seen, and for generations our very survival depended on an intimate, physical knowledge of – and relationship with – the wooded ecosystems of which we formed but one small part.”
Ancient: Reviving the Woods that Made Britain by Luke Barley is available from March 5
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