Rating: 4 out of 5

I found this to be quite hard going. In retrospect I read it in the wrong way for me. I read it as my main book. I should have read it as a research book and given time to it in longer sittings. Reading a few pages at a time didn’t suit this.

I’m not even sure how to categorise this. Memoir? It definitely has aspects of that. Science? It definitely has quite a bit of that tucked into the various chapters. Manifesto? The final chapter definitely feels like that.

This confused categorisation is why I read it as my main book. I often read memoirs and have no problem reading them a few pages at a time before bedtime. This has so much more going on.

The final two chapters, which were read in one sitting, were excellent. Fascinating to learn about soil and what it can do for us given half a chance. And the final chapter covers a lot of what my other Nature research has already covered - benefits to mental state, threats due to children not encountering nature in any real way.

A book on a theme in increasingly interested in. Well worth reading, but worth reading when you can give it space. I suspect if I had then this would have been a 5 star experience.

Highlighted passages:

The environment Ulrich identifies as providing this restorative sense of calm and security involves leafy plants and greenery, still or slow-moving water, spatial openness, free-standing trees and unthreatening wildlife - all features that produce the best recovery responses in modern day stress tests.

Compared with Knepp, most of Britain seems like a desert. It brings an aching sadness, a sense of loss and frustration articulated best by the great American conservationist Aldo Leopold almost a century ago: “one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of words”

Originally posted to my Goodreads account