Being Outside More

  It has been a difficult day, my brain moves slowly. I am not inspired. I take myself out to the garden and wait impatiently for nature to heal me, there are enough self-help books on the subject, surely that's how this works? Come on, fill me up with awe and wonder. I'm practically drumming my fingers now. Branches in a nearby garden are flexing gracefully, welcoming the breeze. My own apple tree sits in a blaze of tulips, yellows and reds. The plum blossom is already starting to fade, brief snowy perfection last weekend, she has welcomed many bees. My thoughts spool forward and I think of summer and glossy stewed plums on my muesli, sprinkled with a hint of cinnamon and ginger. Breakfasting like a medieval lord. A collage I made in a workshop comes to mind, a headline cut from a gardening magazine that said "Tidy The Shed". When you're stuck, just do something. So I tidy the damn shed, carefully taking out all my tools: a spade, a fork, a hoe, loppers, shears, ...

This weekend I visited my parents, who live in Letchworth, the world’s first Garden City. I was reminded how refreshing it is to walk in different places, especially those which are familiar but changed. On Sunday morning we walked part of the Letchworth Greenway . It is a millennium project, put in place after I left home, so it’s not a walk I grew up with. The path is shared, mostly amicably, by walkers, runners and cyclists and is 13.6 miles long, encircling the whole town. One day I would like to walk it all, setting out early one morning in the dawn light, just for a sense of completeness. Dusty chalky soil crunches underfoot. Fields that I remember from my teenage years as being just another monoculture field of wheat or oilseed rape, are now set aside for wildlife, and the scrubland (which has an image problem, seen as scruffy, but provides vital habitat for a wide range of species) is dotted with hawthorn, blackthorn, and bramble. I half remember a quote about “the thorn is the...

Until very recently my 1970s house, with its pebble-dashed exterior and white UPVC windows, came accessorised with another suburban cliché - the leylandii hedge. Leylandii (Cupressus × leylandii) is a fast growing conifer hybrid. It is almost always sterile and so all the plants we see in garden centres  will have been propagated by cuttings. This is a plant that humans have encouraged into life, wanting a rapid thick hedge to protect from the prying eyes of the neighbours. The tallest example of this relatively young species is said to be a 40m (130ft) specimen at Bedgebury National Pinetum in Kent. However, its ability to quickly reach height is also one of the downsides, with leylandii hedges often cited in disputes, including gruesomely in 2003 becoming implicated in a murder, where a man allegedly shot his neighbour after an argument about a hedge. Boundaries are touchy subjects it seems. Around the same time as these sad happenings, we were house hunting. I remember viewing ...

  “What has made you feel warm in the last week?” J asked as we stood in the willow circle at the end of our fourth session of the Grow Leader course. Meteorologically we did of course finally experience physical warmth last week, with Thursday 5th March declared by the Met Office as the UK’s hottest day of 2026 so far. On Wednesday and Thursday I ate both breakfast and lunch outside, soaking up the sunshine and listening to birdsong. But as we went round the circle on Friday we collectively agreed to expand the definition of warmth to include ideas of emotional warmth, joy and contentment. Here are some of my warm feelings from this week: Spotting a blackbird with a beakful of moss, en route to nest-building endeavours. Watching the full moon rise fiercely orange through the branches of the plum tree. A handful of salad leaves added to my lunch one day, picked for me by a colleague at the community allotment. Pounding the pavements after dark with Redfield Ramblers Anonymous. A le...

Admitting that you don’t drive (often assumed to be the same as can’t, but I would argue there’s a subtle difference) often seems to make people uncomfortable. There is a sense that being able to drive is just something that all sensible adults must do. Maybe it’s that quote attributed to Thatcher about a man who finds himself on the bus after the age of 25 being considered a failure. Although after some digging, like many oft-repeated aphorisms, it’s not even clear whether she actually said it. But given that she was a big fan of individualistic self reliance, it’s easy to believe that she wasn’t keen on communal travel. My personal theory is that being a non-driver not only affects your journey time, but also impacts on how you experience the world. Waiting at bus stops has not completely equipped me with a zen like patience, but I do my best to embrace my life as it is. Last week I took my daughter to visit a private exam centre in Bath. Due to autistic burnout she was absent from s...