Everyone knows that a walk in the countryside will make you feel better.  Woods and gardens seem to be particularly efficacious.  The Japanese cottoned on to this some decades ago and started practicing forest bathing, which they call shinrin yoko.  This involves sitting under a tree and acquiring its therapeutic properties.  Having spent much of my life exploring tropical rainforests, leading expeditions of scientists of many disciplines researching how they functioned and campaigning to protect them, it was a surprise to find that on my farm on Bodmin Moor I had one of the largest remnants of temperate rainforest in the UK, which is richer and much rarer globally than any rainforest.  I have now handed the farm over to my son, Merlin, and his wife, Lizziy, who have started a mindfulness retreat on the edge of our forest, which was named recently by the Times as one of the 27 best such retreats in the world. We now have scientists from several leading UK universities studying the individual therapeutic effects of all the different trees in our forest – mostly ancient sessile oaks.

In March 2020 I was one of the first people to be struck down with Covid 19.  I was rushed to Derriford Hospital in Plymouth and taken to Intensive Care, where on three occasions my wife was told I had a less that 5% chance of surviving.  I was in a coma for five weeks on a ventilator and kidney dialysis, and with a tracheostomy tube to breathe through.  Fortunately, Derriford was the first hospital in the UK to have a healing garden attached to its ICU and, when they failed to wake me from my coma, I was only the second patient to be wheeled into it in my bed and with tubes coming out of everywhere.  The Chelsea Flower Show had just been cancelled because of Covid and so the garden had just been sent some flowering plants.  I clearly remember the moment when I opened my eyes, smelled the flowers and saw the blue sky above.  A nurse was filming as I croaked though my tube “I think I am going to live”. I have no doubt at all that it was the healing power of nature that brought me round.  On being released from hospital,  I set about raising over £150,000 to finance an ICU healing garden in Treliske Hospital in Truro and many more are taking shape around the country.