What if I told you that patients who could see trees from their hospital bed window recovered faster, had better post-operative mental wellbeing and required less pain relief than those who looked onto brick walls? That London boroughs with a higher density of trees on the pavements had statistically lower rates of prescribing for antidepressants? Or that inhaling the scent from certain trees increases the levels of natural killer cells in our blood which play a major role in fighting cancer tumours? These eye-popping insights are just a handful of those outlined in a new book by Kathy Willis, professor of biodiversity at the University of Oxford and author of Good Nature: The Science Behind Why Seeing, Smelling, Hearing and Touching Nature is Good For Our Health . While we all know that spending time in the natural world can benefit our physical and mental health, the extent to which this can influence and impact our wellbeing has been widely underestimated and underreported. Despite compelling evidence to the contrary, there still exists a degree of scepticism towards those who extoll the advantages that nature can offer us.
It’s a sentiment that Willis once shared. Read Next The healthiest weekend habits (including having a lie in) “When I started doing this book, I was a cynic,” she tells me. “I thought it was all a bit ‘woo woo’.
” But the process of writing the book has been “a huge journey” for the former director of science at Kew’s Royal Botanic Ga.
