The importance of green.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of green. The older I get, the more I realise the central place it holds in my life. This isn’t something people talk about much. In my thirties, I’m finding people who need it, to live, like me. We sit in cafes and restaurants and share the places to go, the experiences we’ve had. We have livings to make, and bills to pay, and we can’t give it all up to live off grid, or rely on someone else to pay the bills. But we need it, that time to be outdoors, that space, that freedom. We carve it out of our lives, around responsibilities and offices. And I know we can’t be alone.

A friend said to me on Friday that she just needs enough to pay the bills, to feed her dogs. And she’s right. She kept me grounded, to what matters.

In hindsight, I know I’ve always been happiest among plants, among nature. My happiest memories are of garden centres, where as a child I used to feel sorry for plants that had fallen over and walked around righting them all. Wandering among rhododendron bushes. Spending days, weeks at a time in woods, kneeling on the green floor, climbing trees, swinging from ropes – the place my mind goes when looking for my happiest memories. Walking in the Spring countryside. Reading the Secret Garden, Tom’s Midnight Garden, and anything that involved an old house and, yep, a rambling garden.

I think if I had known it was an option, if I had grown up in a different environment, I would have followed my plant life into a career. But I grew up in a world where university and money were the end goals. I understand that, to a certain extent – I live in an expensive county, and I know how lucky I am to have my house, and I need to pay for that. But I still know that my priorities are not the same as a lot of the people I grew up with. My life is arranged around my love for the outside world:my work funds my garden, my allotment, a good pair of walking boots.

When friends had children and told me it was because they were ready to look after someone else, I thought, what about the world? I want to look after the nature we are damaging, the animals and birds dying out, I want my life to have meaning for me. I don’t want to become involved in more consumption. I’m holding on to my truth, and I know I would rather be up at dawn to watch a heron fly over a lake, I’d rather spend all day up to my elbows in soil. That to lose that freedom to me would be prison. It may not be this way for other people, but for me there is no sharing these things, nothing but giving them my full attention.

A friend once told me that whatever choices you make, whether you have a family or not, you should make sure that you make the most of the life that you build. And I’m determined to do that with the privileges I have, which are many. Which is why I’m devoting my time to nature, to wildness, to plants. I’m reading, taking courses, on things that turn my fingers increasingly green; I’m learning to grow flowers, display them all over my house; design a garden, and plant it; grow vegetables, and eat well with them; identify plants and animals; find them, and look after them; notice the world around me, and appreciate it. I’m looking for the wonder in the everyday, because for me there is no other choice. It’s nature, or nothing. As if my toes are growing green webbing and my heart is turning to ivy. As if it’s keeping me alive.

It’s keeping me alive. Awake.

Social media gets a bad press, but I think it has real and urgent value for the voices like mine that try to say, try this life on for size. There’s many ways to live. Look at all the world around you, before you decide. Before it’s too late. Is it me, or is there a new urgency to these messages?

This weekend, I read that green odours in nature moderate activity in the parts of the brain that deal with fear, anxiety and pain. That rain releases a compound in the ground which produces that after-rain fertile smell, and increases serotonin. And I think, of course. When did we forget how much we need nature? That we are nature? When will we remember?