Nature as Healer

Braiding Sweetgrass

Robin Wall Kimmerer · 2013

Kimmerer, a botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, writes about the natural world as a teacher, a healer, and a set of relationships rather than a resource. Her chapters — on mosses, on gardens, on the grammar of animacy — are among the most beautiful pieces of nature writing published in the last two decades, and they change the way you look at every living thing you pass.

The Nature Fix

Florence Williams · 2017

Williams investigates the science behind what happens to humans in natural environments, travelling from Finnish forests to Japanese shinrin-yoku (forest bathing) programmes to South Korean healing gardens to find out what the research actually shows. The findings are more specific and more powerful than most people expect. For readers who want the evidence base alongside the experience, Williams is an excellent guide.

H is for Hawk

Helen Macdonald · 2014

Reeling from her father’s sudden death, naturalist and falconer Helen Macdonald takes on the notoriously difficult task of training a goshawk, throwing herself entirely into the bird’s wild, unsentimental world rather than her own grief. The training itself becomes a kind of medicine — demanding total presence, total attention, no room left over for spiralling. It is fierce, strange, and one of the most original nature memoirs written in the last decade.

Wilding

Isabella Tree · 2018

Tree’s account of rewilding the Knepp estate — returning 3,500 acres of exhausted farmland to nature and watching what happened — is both a conservation story and an argument about what happens when things are allowed to recover on their own terms, without intervention. For readers seeking healing, Knepp’s lesson is gently instructive: sometimes the best thing is to stop managing and let the wildness return.

The Overstory

Richard Powers · 2018

Nine very different lives are gradually drawn together by trees — a chestnut, a banyan, a stand of ancient redwoods — in a sprawling, Pulitzer-winning novel that argues, patiently and persuasively, that we are far more entangled with the natural world than our daily lives ever let us notice. It is the rare book that genuinely changes how a reader looks at a tree afterwards.

The Snow Child

Eowyn Ivey · 2012

An ageing, childless couple homesteading in 1920s Alaska build a child out of snow one evening, half in grief and half in play, and the wilderness around their cabin answers them in ways that blur fairy tale and reality. Ivey writes the Alaskan landscape as an active, almost sentient presence in the couple’s healing, not simply a backdrop to it.

Where the Crawdads Sing

Delia Owens · 2018

Abandoned by everyone who was supposed to stay, Kya is raised by the North Carolina marsh itself — its herons and tides and quiet patience becoming the steadiest presence in her life. Owens, a wildlife scientist by training, writes the marsh with such precision and tenderness that it becomes the novel’s real protagonist, and its real source of healing.