‘Nature has helped me to heal – just being outdoors can really lift you’
WILD REMEDY Author Emma Mitchell tells Boudicca FoxLeonard how wildlife has helped keep her depression at bay
Asa child, Emma Mitchell recalls visiting dusty stately homes and museums with her family, where she was always drawn to the Victorian curiosity cabinets; fascinated by the botanical wonders that 19th-century explorers brought back from their tours.
It was to the memory of them that she turned when she started her blog in 2008 and later her Instagram page dedicated to the treasures she brings back from the natural world.
Sprigs of spindle and blackthorn, a garden posy immortalised in ink or a colour gradation of hydrangea petals; each post catalogues a walk, a thought, a feeling. It was mostly for her own delight, and perhaps, “a couple of pals, a botanist and a gardener”. That they have resonated with others – to the tune of 105,000 followers on Instagram – has been a very pleasant surprise.
She has answered, she feels, a need for more people to connect to nature. “People are really excited to start to learn about the plants around them again; knowledge that 100 years ago pretty much every child would have,” says Mitchell.
Her connection was fostered by days in her grandad’s garden in suburban Liverpool (“He had a pond and I was engrossed and enchanted by the things that grew in it”) and later a degree in zoology at Cambridge.
In later years, being connected to the outdoors has taken on deeper meaning; thwarting the crashing wave of depression that has periodically consumed Mitchell. Since her first bout of depression more than 20 years ago, she has observed how the changing seasons, the weather and nature affect her mood.
When she and her husband moved to the Cambridgeshire fens in 2003, Mitchell was caught on the rails of a frenetic career in tech consultancy. It was then the newly planted native woods behind her cottage became a sanctuary. She would walk, collect and sketch her finds, and craft, sowing the seeds of the Instagram feed that has grown today.
But it was after agreeing to keep a nature diary for a year as the follow up to her craft book, Making Winter, that the importance was brought into crisp focus for the 46-year-old mother of two.
Starting her diary in October 2017, Mitchell chronicled her usual battle through winter, employing all her wiles to see off seasonal affective disorder (SAD) only to find, instead of the joys of spring at the end, one of the worst periods of “the grey slug” in years. “That winter was incredibly long and torturous. I was exhausted by March and just sank,” recalls Mitchell.
Today when I meet her, eight months on, she’s upright, energetic and the book is finished. The memory of those months is still raw, but she has decided to share them in The Wild Remedy.
“You have to take it a day at a time, and sometimes literally half an hour at a time,” she says. “Sometimes I’m still so overwhelmed by the SAD.”
It wasn’t an easy decision to share quite how low she got. She asked herself how much was too much? But the benefit for others, she felt, outweighed her own privacy. “What I wanted to do was describe exactly how I felt in case it might help the relatives of people with depression. I wanted to talk about suicidal thoughts because it’s really common and I don’t think it’s talked about enough. Suicidal brains have a different chemistry to standard brains. The thoughts are tumbling and crazy, like you’re going down a hill and it’s difficult to put the brakes on.”
Tackling the stigma has resulted in a beautiful book that explores the seasons in elegant prose accompanied by Mitchell’s charming illustrations. It’s a diary of nature, but also of how it can heal. “I wanted to be candid about what happened. It was terrible but I’m still here and what helped me to heal was antidepressants and therapy, but also nature.”
Mitchell isn’t alone in extolling the virtues of the outdoors. She’s buoyed by news stories of GPS in the Hebrides prescribing nature walks and beachcombing. And joint research from the University of Madrid and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences published in 2007 showed that seeing natural landscapes could speed up recovery from stress and mental fatigue. Meanwhile, a 2017 University of Exeter study demonstrated that the presence of vegeta-
‘The thoughts are tumbling and crazy, like you’re going downhill with no brakes’
tion in an urban landscape diminishes levels of depression, anxiety and perceived stress levels in city dwellers.
Most of us are running a nature deficit, myself included. But still, it’s a gloomy, midwinter day. We’re on the sofa in Mitchell’s cosy cottage, hugging mugs of tea. An unfinished tableaux of winter buds and plants sits on her drawing table. I’m not at all tempted to go for a walk, which is precisely why we’re going on one, says Mitchell.
“The days where it makes the most difference to your mental health are days like this when you really want to snuggle up. But if you get out it can really lift you,” says Mitchell, as we pull on boots and take her energetic lurcher, Annie, for a walk in the woods.
Mitchell is a fan of Shinrin-yoku, the “forest bathing” phenomenon popular in Japan since the Eighties. Research shows walking among trees decreases blood pressure, levels of the stress hormone cortisol, anxiety and helps us tune out of the sympathetic nervous system, responsible for “fight or flight”.
Studies have also shown that levels of white blood cells called natural killer (NK) cells, which can destroy virally infected and certain cancerous cells, increase when humans spend time in a woodland environment. Not to mention the boost in serotonin that daylight gives you, and the endorphins garnered from a walk.
Learning to love winter has helped Mitchell when combating SAD. She points out the signs of spring; seedlings and the beginnings of cow parsley, germinated in August and just starting to grow. Catkins that are tiny now but growing slowly until in March when they are ready to release their pollen into the breeze.
“Each year, I discover more about the change in the season. Winter is not just about everything being dormant,” says Mitchell. Though dormancy, too, can harbour beauty: hiding in a desiccated wild carrot is a loveliness of ladybirds in a hibernaculum until spring.
Together we gather rose hips and hawthorn berries to take back to the cottage. Redwings and fieldfares shoot overhead, visitors from Siberia. Winter might feel bleak at times, but it’s uplifting when you venture out to discover what is happening.
Yet Mitchell was so low in March and April last year that she couldn’t even leave the house. She stopped writing her nature diary and was unable to do anything once the girls had gone to school but sit on her sofa, wrapped in a blanket and looking out of the window at the birds that came to visit her feeding station.
“The birds essentially kept me alive in April,” she says now. “Just watching the blue tits, or the blackbird seeing off the jays. It was like Coronation Street and more affordable than a fancy retreat or the Priory. All you need is a tenner’s-worth of bird food and a couple of hooks to hang the feeders on.”
Incidence of mental illness is increasing in the world’s population; the digital age, isolation from community and more stressful lives are all contributing factors. Mitchell knows she isn’t cured. She will feel depressed again, but in writing the book she has cemented the processes that she knows will help her.
“I can feel the SAD kicking in again, but this time I went outside and did some digging for an hour and a half until I was physically wrecked because SAD takes away so much of my energy. But with me was a robin, and that was like a dose of antidepressant.
“Even if it is only through a glass window, by looking out you’re tapping into those pathways where our ancestors would have been out hunting or foraging, seeing birds and experiencing time among trees and plants.”
‘The birds kept me alive until April, just watching the blue tits, blackbirds and jays’
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