Good Nature: Why Seeing, Smelling, Touching and Hearing Plants Improves Our Health, Happiness and Longevity

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Description

Good Nature is a groundbreaking exploration that reveals how, if we bring nature more into our lives, it can help improve our health and well-being in so many unexpected ways. Oxford professor Kathy Willis has spent her career researching fossilised plants and plant matter but when she stumbled across a study that showed that patients recovering from surgery improved faster just by being able to see trees from their hospital bed, it radically changed the way she viewed the natural world. Professor 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 plants in our lives, both indoors and outside, and better physical and mental health. Consulting plant scientists and biologists, medical practitioners and psychiatrists, city planners and government health authorities, she encourages us to transform how we design and inhabit our environments. There are simple changes we can all make in our homes: for example, the scent of rosemary will make you more awake; green-and-yellow-leaved houseplants are the best at reducing stress; and touching and stroking untreated wooden surfaces can lower our blood pressure. But we can also think on a much grander scale: prescribing more nature in streets, offices and our homes will not only save money but improve the health of us all. Focusing on how we interact with nature through the senses of sight, smell, hearing and touch, Good Nature explains how we can organise our homes, our time outdoors and the world around us to reap the health benefits of nature that science is only now just discovering.

Author Bio

Katherine Willis CBE is Professor of Biodiversity in the department of Biology and the Principal of St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford. She is also a Crossbench Peer in the House of Lords. Previous roles include Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and a member of the UK Governments Natural Capital Committee. She has extensive broadcast experience and, in 2015, Kathy was awarded the Michael Faraday Medal for public communication of science from the Royal Society.