Good Nature

Oxford Professor Kathy Willis spent her career studying fossilised plants and plant matter - but it wasn't until she was contributing to an international project looking for the societal benefits of plants that she stumbled across a study that radically changed the way she viewed the natural world. The study showed that patients recovering from surgery improved faster just by looking at trees - that the benefit comes from our sensory experience of plants, not just from environmental improvements. Dr Willis has since embarked on a process of discovery to find the research that has shown, time and time again, that there is a causal link between the amount of greenspace and trees in our lives and better health outcomes. Consulting plant scientists and biologists, medical practitioners and psychiatrists, city-planners and government health authorities, she builds an evidence-base that can, and should, transform how we design and inhabit our environments. Focusing on the four senses of sight, smell, hearing and touch, as well as how we should organise our homes, our time outdoors, and our medical routines to reap the benefits of all this new research, Good Nature brings us into the laboratory - evoking the thrill of scientific discovery - and out again into the natural world, making us see and experience it with new eyes.