The closest our columnist usually gets to a forest is outdoor opera in a London park. So how would she take to the latest mindfulness trend for tree hugging?
WHEN I was invited to investigate an exciting new Japanese trend called shinrin-yoku, I was beside myself with enthusiasm. Japan! I love Japan. Sushi is my favourite food, I’m a big fan of cherry blossom, my sister once had a boyfriend who looked like a Samurai and I’ve always wanted to visit Mount Fuji.
What could this new trend be? An interesting type of fusion cuisine? A new style of kimono?
When I was told that shinrinyoku is Japanese for something called forest bathing I wasn’t very much wiser.Although I was quite a bit more wary.
You don’t get more urban a person than me: my natural habitat is Harvey Nichols and I prefer my bathing to take place in swimming pools attached to five-star hotels.
But I am a slave to this newspaper’s questing spirit so I obediently went off to investigate.
Shinrin-yoku, it turns out, has nothing to do with water and involves what was once called a stroll in the woods, with mindfulness attached.
It became popular in Japan 40 years ago as an antidote to the stresses of being a salaryman – an office wage-slave.And it has now taken off over here as we all seek to combat the strains of modern life.
The Woodland Trust wants doctors to prescribe it for people suffering from anxiety and
depression, Forestry England is also a big fan and a study last year by King’s College London established that being among trees and hearing birdsong promotes wellbeing.
What’s not to like? Well, you can’t wear heels for a start.
The Woodland Trust website seemed a good place to begin. You type in your postcode and it brings up your nearest wood. I duly oblige and find my nearest wood is in fact Holland Park, in central London’s Kensington, which is my kind of forest.
It has peacocks, an opera festival and a restaurant housed in a 17th-century ballroom. Someone mows the lawn.
I’d be perfectly happy to immerse myself in this spot of woodland but I have a feeling that it isn’t quite what’s required. So it is I find myself in Hainault Forest in Greater London, as a guest of the Woodland Trust – which, I must say, has pulled out all the stops to help me find my inner wood nymph.
The session has been put together by Stuart Dainton, the Woodland Trust’s Head of Innovation, and various experts are on hand, including Faith Douglas, who lives in a forest and is a shinrin-yoku practitioner. She is looking a little stressed having been, unusually for her, on the Tube earlier.Welcome to my world.
But I’m in her world now and seriously, it involves a lot of trees. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does
Virginia Blackburn
it make a sound? It probably sniggers unpleasantly to itself, if you ask me, at the thought that some of the greatest minds in the world will spend years deliberating that one and indeed, the trees around me are definitely looking a little smug.
Ilot, I think, with their bark and their leaves and their hidden roots waiting to trip you, and I can’t say I’m in the slightest bit surprised when there’s a health and safety warning to the
effect that we should watch out for falling branches. Sly things, trees, never missing a chance to get one over on you. It’s revenge, I suppose, for paper and halftimbered houses.
My inner wood nymph tells me to put a lid on it. Hainault Forest is undoubtedly a beautiful place: it was one of the Royal Hunting Forests, and once 10 times its current size until in 1851 the Victorians cut most of it down. A public outcry saved the rest of it and it is home to much wildlife, including birds – which I do like as their plumage often inspires the more flamboyant Italian fashion designers – and