Love Scotland podcast – 2025 season, part II

Transcript

Eight speakers: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Kathy Willis [KW]; Tim Keyworth [TK]; Andrew Painting [AP]; second male voiceover [MV2]; Ciaran Hatsell [CH]; Andrew Dempster [AD]

[MV]
Love Scotland, brought to you from the National Trust for Scotland; presented by Jackie Bird.

[JB]
Have you ever hugged a tree? Taken part in some forest-bathing (no swimsuit required for this one!)? Or simply been cheered up by that pot plant on your desk? Well, if so, you’ll know something of the effect of nature on our wellbeing. But if you’ve ever wondered why you’ve felt like this, then my guest today is uniquely placed to explain.

 A number of years ago, Kathy Willis read a study that changed her view of our relationship with the natural world. The study revealed that hospital patients recovering from surgery improved 3 times faster when they looked out of their windows at trees rather than walls. So, Kathy began her own study on the link between the amount of green space in our lives and our better health, mood and even longevity.

Of course, it helped that Kathy is Professor of Biodiversity at the University of Oxford, so she has a scientific head-start on the rest of us. And I’m very pleased to say she’s joining us on Love Scotland. Welcome, Kathy.

[KW]
Thank you very much.

[JB]
Now, you’ve pulled together those findings in a book called Good Nature. It’s got countless examples of how our interactions with nature, however small, make us feel good. So, why was it necessary to search out the scientific explanation for what we felt in our bones?

[KW]
I think because the problem with nature, any interaction with nature, the minute you start talking about nature, people think it’s nice, fluffy bunnies, pretty flowers – but actually there’s no scientific evidence. It’s all in the mind. It’s all a cultural thing. Your grandmother gave you lavender bags and therefore they make you calmer.

And the thing I found about that hospital study was that they were looking at both physiological and psychological markers in the body and seeing that it was actually affecting – there was a mechanism of action happening in the body – when people were looking out of a clinical room onto a green wall. They were having a physical response and a mental response.

And so, I felt that the time had come to say, what clinical evidence is out there? Is there much and what interactions? Should we be seeing or smelling or hearing or touching nature? I started this journey as a very cynical scientist; I always like to really kick the tyres. And I thought, well, this is all a bit voodoo science-ish. And then every time I looked at a different set of studies, I just became more and more convinced that there is a very strong evidence base to show that things happen to our nervous system, to our hormonal system, to our psychological state, to even our gut microbiome, when we interact with nature.

And the other really important thing is these things happen automatically. You don’t have to think ‘I’m in nature, therefore I’m more relaxed’. It will happen regardless of whether or not you think that. But also, it shows that even if you’re stressed and you look out a window onto green, you recover faster if you look out onto green than if you look out onto a brick wall.

So, it’s not only good for when you’re feeling stressed, but also even if you don’t feel very stressed – it’s both physical and mental relaxation that occurs, or one of the actions, when we interact with nature.

[JB]
And is it the case that it’s only in recent years that we’ve had the technology to be able to measure what is happening, or that we’ve never really had the desire to do it?

[KW]
I think it’s a bit of both actually. But I think, certainly in terms of understanding, let’s give … there’s one thing in particular when they’ve been looking at brain activity and they look at which areas, when you’re interacting with nature, you get the greatest activity in the brain. And there’s a particular magnetic resonance measurement system that’s come out in the last 10 years. Therefore, you can start to see which parts of the brain are getting the neural activity going on when you interact with different aspects of nature.

One of my favourite, and most surprising, examples I think was the fact that when you smell certain plant compounds – when you walk in a pine forest and you smell that very piney smell – what actually happens? You don’t just breathe it in and breathe it out again. When you smell those compounds, pinene – which is the volatile compound creating that smell – passes across your lung membrane into your bloods.

So, your blood has a higher level of pinene in it after you walked in a pine forest than before. Now, they measure that using a gas chromatography method to look at these different compounds. And so therefore, it’s the technological innovations that have happened – along with more direct interest – that’s merged together to build this evidence base that we just didn’t really have before. 

We sort of probably knew. If you think about aromatherapy and what has been used in all those years in aromatherapy. So now I know, from looking at the evidence base, that lavender, for example – it’s not your old grandmother’s tales or a cultural memory. When you breathe in lavender, the lavender compounds that create that smell, they do pass into your blood and they interact with the same biochemical pathways as if you’re taking an anti-anxiety drug. 

And when you put people in sleep chambers and you puff out lavender vs no-lavender, the people that have lavender that night, they have longer intervals of sleep, but also they have more of that deep sleep, which we all need for our health.

So, you can start to see. They’ve tried even with things like lavender and limonene, which is another one – they’ve tried it on babies and still see this reduction in the stress markers. Babies have no cultural memory – eight-week-old babies – so you can start to see this is really stuff that’s not all in the mind. It’s actually things really going on in the bodies. 

[JB]
We’ll talk some more about smell later. You describe it as a Cinderella sense, and we’re not really harnessing the power of smell. But, as you know, the National Trust for Scotland holds nature very dear to our heart. And to that end, we thought we’d break off from our chat occasionally to hear from some of the Trust teams about their nature experience.

So, let’s go first to Tim Keyworth. Now, he’s a Gardens and Landscapes Manager and he works from Brodick Castle on Arran. 

[TK]
As I walk out of the office at Brodick Castle, the first thing that I hear is the sound of the birds. I already instantly feel a lot more connected to nature. I feel the crunch of the gravel beneath my feet. This makes me feel more grounded and, as I head over to a summer house that overlooks the walled garden, I’m already starting to feel a lot more relaxed after a morning of paperwork. 

I look back to the hills behind me, and the landscape really gives me a sense of awe and wonder, and how I fit into this place. It’s very calming. I’m definitely at my happiest when I’m outside. I feel incredibly lucky to work in a place like this.

[JB]
He does sound incredibly laid back, does Tim! 

[KW]
I want some of that please! 

[JB]
I want to be there! I also suppose that the importance of your findings, Kathy, goes hand in hand with the fact that we now know just how detrimental stress can be on our bodies.

[KW]
Absolutely. So, there’s two things that come from that snippet we’ve just heard, that sound snippet. But just addressing your first point: about 78% of global deaths now every year are due to non-communicable diseases. They are things related to cancers, to strokes, to heart attacks, to high blood pressure – to all of those things that have a really strong link to stress.

And the more we move into cities and the less nature we interact with, it would appear the greater and more stressed we have become. So, going back then to that wonderful snippet, the first thing is when I did the chapter on sound, absolutely: sounds of birds, birdsong, trees, water trickling past. They’ve tried it on many people and show that it does make you both physiologically and psychologically calmer when you hear those sounds.

Not all sounds of nature make you calmer! And they’ve shown with birdsong in particular, the tuneful birdsong – the sort he’s describing there – that does make you physiologically calm. Your blood pressure goes down, your hormonal levels are much lower, or the stress hormones go down. 

[JB]
You’ve actually gone as far as naming some birds though – haven’t you? – to look out for, like blackbirds?

[KW]
Blackbirds, warblers – if you look at the spectral signature, there’s lots of pattern in it. But if you have a loud squawking noise from a crow, or something like a parrot or even a seagull, that very sharp squawking sound from birds can actually have the opposite effect. It can make you stressed. So, it’s the sort of sounds of birds that you hear.

They’ve gone as far as actually placing headphones on people in hospital who have operations – let’s say with an epidural, so that they’re still awake – and they measure their salivary amylase, which is a really good indication in the saliva of stress. The higher the stress, the higher these levels. And they’ve measured it in the beginning and the end of the operation. Those people that wear the headphones hearing birdsong have much, much lower stress levels throughout the operation when they’re awake, than those who hear no sound or hear the background sounds. So, it’s a really interesting way of taking the science and the data – and then being able to use it in a very applied way.

[JB]
So, what happens in our brain when we look at a plant?

[KW]
The psychological theory with this now is called the stress reduction theory. We have two biologically predetermined responses when we view a horizon. We have a preference for natural spaces. And what they’ve shown is when you look at a green horizon rather than a built horizon, it leads to this more positively toned emotional state. And as a result of that, that seems to trigger these mechanisms of actions in our body, which I was talking about before, automatically. So, you’ll get this automatic response in your nervous system – your breathing rate will go down, your heart rate goes down. It triggers the endocrine system, the hormonal system – and you’ll find things like your salivary amylase levels go down. And it also affects things like your psychological state; people are less anxious. 

All of these things happen because it’s the way that your brain has … it’s a psychological state you go into when you look at nature. But there’s also something really interesting about looking at nature. When you look at nature, the other thing they’ve shown is that your cognitive performance improves after doing it. That’s a different theory, that one is called attention restoration theory, and most people will relate to this. When you spend a lot of time working on one piece of reading or writing, or staring at the computer, your attention does start to wane. And it’s because that is your directed attention. 

Now, when you look out the window or onto a picture even on your computer screen, of a green horizon, that uses a different source of attention. It uses this bottom-up attention that they now know we have. It’s called an involuntary attention and it gives your mind this mental mini-break. And when you go back to the task in hand, because it’s refreshed, you do better. It’s really incredible the number of studies that are out there now, where they’ve had people – from school children to teenagers to office workers – have a 5-minute (or even less – 90 seconds in one example) break staring out the window. When they came back, they were faster at the test and they were more accurate.

[JB]
You do realise this is terrible news for teachers everywhere who have tried to stop pupils looking out the window?!

[KW]
I know! But it’s also got a really interesting policy behind it. Because actually what it says is in playgrounds – doesn’t matter where your school is – if you’ve got a brick wall, you should cover it with ivy or something, some vegetation. So, when people do stare out the window, which they will do, it could be a good thing, but it’s only a good thing if they can look onto green.

[JB]
Right, so any smart Alec kids listening to this can retort ‘Miss, miss; I’m working on my attention restorative theories’.

[KW]
Yeah, something like that!

[JB]
Let’s go back to the birdsong because we have another clip from one of the Trust teams, which just sounds so delightful. Let’s hear from Andrew Painting, who’s a conservation officer at Mar Lodge Estate in the Cairngorms.

[AP]
One of the lovely things about woodlands in spring is that they just come alive with birdsong. Currently, I’m listening to chaffinches, blue tits, mistle thrush, tree-creepers. It’s a wonderful thing, and if you really tune into birdsong, you can work out what habitat you’re in just by listening, which is always a lovely thing to think about.

One of my favourite times of the year is early spring, when the woods – which at Mar Lodge have been really quite quiet over the winter, covered in snow, everything moves south – suddenly comes back alive with birdsong. But spring hasn’t really started until you hear the first cuckoo.

[KW]
He makes a really good point that actually the whole world is coming alive again after spring. But does that mean that we can’t interact with nature in the winter, when we probably most need it? The really important thing, I think, I discovered by looking at all this stuff is you can bring an awful lot of nature indoors and still get the same effects. So, you can play birdsong on your speakers, on your headphones, but you can also have plants inside. You can have smells inside through diffusers. And so, you don’t have to be outdoors to gain these benefits from nature. We need to surround ourselves with nature everywhere.

[JB]
Is it possible to determine which of our senses in that case, when we’re in nature, works most effectively for us? Is it sight, sound, smell, touch?

[KW]
Well, I mean, in a sense they’re all there. That’s the beauty of being in nature because you’re getting a stacked benefit. But there are two benefits that I’d just not been aware of, not come across. And I think in some ways, if we’re talking about resilience to future health risks, there are two that are particularly important.

The first one is smell. As I mentioned earlier, when you smell particular scents, the molecules pass into your blood and there they trigger all sorts of other biochemical reactions. And one that’s really interesting, they show people who walk or even have diffused cypress (Cupressaceae) scent, they have elevated natural killer cells in their blood.

And these elevated natural killer cells can last for up to seven days after walking in the forest, which has got that very strong smell of cypress in the air. Natural killer cells attack cancer virus cells, so we want elevated levels in our blood; it gives you that resilience. And so, to me, that’s a really interesting research avenue; it’s just really starting in the last few years. 

But there’s a very good paper published in one of the cancer journals on oncology (I think it is), which shows the people who live in this Japanese cypress forest, so surrounded by them, automatically have much higher levels of natural killer cells in their blood than those who live near the city. But they also showed those that went to walk in the forest for a couple of hours ended up with these elevated levels that remained. So, I think that’s the first one that I found really interesting.

[JB]
Now that sounds like serious stuff. Is that where forest-bathing comes in? Because I’d never heard of forest-bathing before. 

[KW]
Forest-bathing is prescribed in Japan now. In some ways the Japanese medical sciences are way ahead of us. I went to Singapore recently and they have in their hospital a department of Biodiversity in Medicine. They’re already thinking about this as a practical thing to be doing. With forest-bathing, it’s everything – it’s sight, sound, smell; all of these things that you can be prescribed to go and sit in the forest for two hours a week for example.

Where I’ve taken the research that I’ve pulled together in the book is you don’t have to go and sit in the forest for two hours a week. You can bring those senses – you can get them from your local park – into your home. I have a diffuser now in my office at home, where I press the button in the morning. I have a 10-minute puff of Japanese oil in the air from the diffuser because it’s not going to do me any harm. But if it is going to raise my natural killer cells, thank you very much. I’ll take some of that!

So, it’s thinking really about what we can individually do, and we don’t need to wait to be prescribed; a lot of these things we can naturally do in our everyday lives. It takes small tweaks to build up a resilience that we all really want.

[JB]
So, Kathy, we now have the evidence of the benefits of nature. Let’s take a break and when we come back, we’re going to find out how best to utilise all of that free good stuff that’s out there.

[MV2]
You need to smell the flowers, said my bro. Turns out wild heather works just as well. We were up Ben Lomond like mountain goats. Couldn’t believe it was so close to home. At the top though, life was a million miles away. So, we signed up to help look after it. We all need looking after.

[MV]
Since 1931, the National Trust for Scotland, a charity supported by you, has been looking after Scotland’s treasured places so we can all share in them. Support us at nts.org.uk

[JB]
Welcome back to Love Scotland, and my guest today is Kathy Willis, Professor of Biodiversity at Oxford University and the author of the book Good Nature. Kathy, a lot of what you report on is the scientific basis for the benefits of nature that we already know about. But even you were impressed by something I had never heard of called environmental microbes. What are they and what do they do?

[KW]
I was blown away when I started doing this chapter, and I didn’t stop going on about it for quite a while! I think I got very unpopular in my own home. Effectively, we’ve all heard about gut microbiome and that we have these bacteria in our gut and, depending on the composition of bacteria in our gut, they trigger all of these metabolic processes.

And now there’s a lot of discussion about the gut/brain access and how important the gut is in our health. So, we’re all advised to eat 30 green vegetables a week and to drink probiotics. What I hadn’t realised, and this work was done about 15 years ago and it just got missed, is that a really world-class ecologist in Finland worked with the top of the medical sciences in Helsinki and they came up with the idea that when you’re in the natural environment, in a biodiverse environment, it’s full of good bacteria in that environment.

The more biodiverse it is, the better the bacteria are in the environment. And they’re the same sort of bacteria that we want in our gut; they’re exactly the same groups. And what they showed was that when people were in these more biodiverse environments, they had a much higher level of these good bacteria on their hands, in their nasal passages and in their gut. So, effectively, your body adopts the signature of the environmental microbiome if you’re in a good microbiome. 

Now, why is this important? Well, to show why it’s important, these are studies that have been done in the last couple of years, and they’ve been done on nursery school/kindergarten children. And what they did was they had three playgrounds. In one they just had normal matting – plastic matting. The other one had the normal sort of concrete and the usual stuff. And in the third, they bought in trunks of soil from the forest; this is a coniferous forest nearby. For 28 days the children played on these different playgrounds. 

And they measured the microbiome on their skin and they measured the microbiome in their poo. They also measured their bloods to see whether there were any changes in the markers in their bloods. And after 28 days, there was a really significant difference. The children that played in the soil had a greatly enhanced microbiome in their gut of the good biota, but also really importantly in their blood, the T cells that show inflammatory markers, effectively they had greatly reduced inflammatory markers in their bloods. 

So not only had they changed the gut flora, but as we are seeing in many other studies, if you change your gut flora, you can affect … there seems to be some metabolic process that goes on that they don’t fully understand that starts to affect the inflammatory markers in the blood.

[JB]
That’s extraordinary. 

[KW]
Really extraordinary. And we’ve known, haven’t we, for a long time actually, we’ve got all these massive increases going on in children who are highly allergic to all these things. And now the hypothesis is that the more sterile the environment we put our children in, effectively you are sterilising their microbiome that’s around them as well. And so therefore, you’re not giving them that resilience that builds up by having this diverse gut flora and skin flora.

There’s a lot more work to be done on this, but these trials – there’s three of them now that I know of – are published in Science and Arts; they’re published in the top science journals. They are randomised controlled trials; they’re proper clinical trials. And I think we should all take a lot of hope from these because it’s starting to show that nature itself can build, in children and adults, the resilience that we need and reduce the inflammatory markers that we really don’t want, because those are ones that trigger all of these autoimmune diseases.

[JB]
And that really plays into the fact that I’ve noticed an increase in the number of outdoor nurseries now. I used to feel sorry for the little tykes in Scotland in January, digging the frozen earth. But now? No, no. Harden you up and help your gut! 

[KW]
Get them out the door! When I visited Finland a couple of years ago, before I was doing this work, they have a completely different attitude about children outdoors over the winter. Even the small babies in the pram – it’s -10 and they’re for two hours in the pram! But now I think, you know what, it’s probably really good for them.

[JB]
And again, it harks back to what you were saying about changing your own environment. You can bring these microbes into a room and there’s evidence to prove that. 

[KW]
There’s a lovely study done on spider plants. I mean, who would think a spider plant was an attractive thing to have? I now have many! They showed a single spider plant – they put it into an air-conditioned room, which was completely cleansed. And then they went back six weeks later: the environmental microbes on that spider plant had seeded the ceiling, the walls, the floors. It had created the environmental microbiome in this sealed room.

And there’s another lovely study, again published in a very good science journal, where they put a green wall in an office and they measured the gut and skin microbiota of the adults working in the office vs people next door who didn’t have one. And sure enough, after 28 days, they saw the same changes, both in their skin and gut flora, but also in their markers – the T cell markers in their bloods.

[JB]
Let’s take a moment now to eavesdrop on our last National Trust for Scotland special guest appearance. Ciaran Hatsell is Head Ranger at St Abb’s Head National Nature Reserve in the Borders.

[CH]
I’m currently sat here looking over a wild, windswept grey ocean. The waves are battering the cliffs – cliffs which will soon be packed with thousands of seabirds. It really is an incredible sight, and for me there’s nothing better for you than just getting out and having a walk in nature. The physical benefits are obvious, but the mental health benefits are actually probably under-appreciated.

I’m really lucky to get to work here on this amazing nature reserve. But you don’t have to go very far to find nature. In the middle of cities, we can have starling roosts and pied wagtail roosts in really busy places. A key message maybe is to focus on the little things. Look at what’s around you; look at what’s in your patch.

So, just get out there and immerse yourself in nature, whether you’re in the middle of a city, whether you’ve just got a window to look out of! Just feel that wind in your hair and try and appreciate nature, however you can, wherever you can.

[JB]
Sound advice there, from Ciaran. 

[KW]
All three of these snippets are so moving and so right. This is not something for the privileged. Any small patch, anywhere that you can go and appreciate nature – it could be a green wall in a city; it could be a small patch of green community woodland; anywhere. But also, you can bring it indoors. You can look out onto it, but also even just your computer screen, your screensaver – put a forest on it. Don’t have some angular picture on there.

And the point that he also made was actually looking onto blue as well. So, a lot of work’s been done – and my book is about nature and about green nature – but there’s a lot of evidence about looking onto blue. Blue water also can trigger very, very positive benefits. You certainly have a more relaxed psychological state when you’re looking onto blue. 

[JB]
And for people who can’t, as you say, access the countryside easily, there is advice. And again, this is scientifically based because a lot of this, people will say, well, I know that; if I go out for a walk, I feel better. This is telling you, now we know why – that if you go out for a walk, you can change your route, even a short walk in the middle of the day away from work, and make it more beneficial for you.

[KW]
There’s some lovely studies where they’ve measured people walking. There’s a nice one with young men, all the same age. They didn’t have coffee, they didn’t smoke, they didn’t do anything beforehand. They kept it all as controlled as possible. And they walked for 15 minutes in the streets and then they did 15 minutes walking around the edge of the park. They showed a really strong difference in blood pressure, in psychological wellbeing indexes, etc, etc – just by walking around the edge of the park or walking on a street with trees, rather than walking on a street with traffic.

Now, as you say, with all of this, people go, well, I know that of course, but actually how many people change their direction in order to do it? And I think that’s the thing once you see the scientific evidence base. For me personally, I do now take a different route to work as a result of that. And at weekends, we’ve always gone stomping the highways and byways around Oxford. I’ve always loved being outdoors, but I feel most of my time in Oxford is behind a desk, as it is today. But in this room I’ve now got five plants and I’ve got flowers on my computer screen. You know, small things. A diffuser behind me when I’m feeling particularly stressed. So, you can just make these small tweaks which can make a very, very different way to the way that you feel, both physically and mentally.

[JB]
And even what you think about changed your ruminations?

[KW]
Yep, absolutely. Ruminations are very negative – when you start to go into that doom loop when you’re thinking. And what they showed is people who are walking in nature, they have a lot less ruminations than the people who are walking, let’s say, on the street. So again, it can just flip that switch in your mind where you’re feeling it’s one thing after another after another. You go and walk in the park or on a street with trees, and you just don’t do this nearly as much.

[JB]
We know now that COVID gave us renewed appreciation for nature, but a bit like the Pied Piper, now that the threat has gone, will the impetus to save the green areas, which, as we keep saying, science now tells us they are beneficial, will that impetus remain as strong?

[KW]
I think that’s a really interesting question. What the evidence base is showing is that people who took up gardening, going outside during COVID, have continued. So, there hasn’t been a dramatic drop, which I think is really good. But I think the biggest threat will be the new building and planning regulations coming through.

We know we need more houses; there’s no question of that. No one should argue we don’t – we’re in a housing crisis. But we do need to think about, in cities, including green space and vegetation and nature as much as any other infrastructure. We think about roads, we think about water, we think about electricity – where do we put nature so everybody can access nature within where they live? 

[JB]
And if there’s one thing we should take from your book, what would it be?

[KW]
Gosh, one thing … spend time in nature every day.

[JB]
I will do just that forthwith. Kathy Willis, thank you for your time and for giving us some inspiration.

[KW]
Thank you, I’ve enjoyed talking to you.

[JB]
And Kathy’s book Good Nature is out now, published by Bloomsbury. And thanks to the Trust team who dropped by – Tim Keyworth, Andrew Painting and Ciaran Hatsell – thanks for sharing your experiences. I hope they’ve inspired you to take a walk on the wild, or not so wild, side.

The National Trust for Scotland is committed to protecting and conserving Scotland’s nature, beauty and heritage. From maintaining accessible and remote footpaths to cataloguing every plant species in our gardens, we do it because of your membership and donations, so thank you.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of Love Scotland. There is a new podcast each fortnight, so hit the subscribe button and never miss an episode. That’s all for now. Until next time, goodbye!

And if you’re a seasoned hill walker or just thinking of lacing up your boots, have a search on our Love Scotland archive for an edition called The Munros: Mountain myths and milestones.

[AD]
I’d been in thick cloud for a good few hours and I had this feeling it was never really going to lift. But it was one of those magical days when you come out of the cloud, you rise out of this constricting grey mass, and you’re up and you see blue sky. And then you think, oh wonderful. And then you go up a bit further and there’s just a sea of cloud with peaks rising up above. I think any hill walker will know that that is one of those magical occasions which happen now and again. But I was very, very surprised. I really thought I was going to be walking in cloud for the whole day.

[MV]
Love Scotland is brought to you by Think and Demus Productions, on behalf of the National Trust for Scotland; presented by Jackie Bird. For show notes and more information, go to nts.org.uk and don’t forget to like, subscribe, review and share.