In Search of the Nature Cure: On Beauty with Samantha Walton

Everybody is talking about the healing properties of nature. Hospitals are being retrofitted with gardens, and forests reimagined as wellbeing centres. On the Shetland Islands, it is possible to walk into a doctor's surgery with anxiety or depression, and walk out with a prescription for nature.

Where has this come from, and what does 'going to nature' mean? Where is it – at the end of a garden, beyond the tarmac fringes of a city, at the summit of a mountain?

Drawing on history, science, literature and art, Samantha Walton shows that the nature cure has deep roots – but, as we face an unprecedented crisis of mental health, social injustice and environmental devastation, the search for it is more urgent now than ever.

Everybody Needs Beauty engages seriously with the connection between nature and health, while scrutinising the harmful trends of a wellness industry that seeks to exploit our relationship with the natural world. In doing so, this book explores how the nature cure might lead us towards a more just and radical way of life: a real means of recovery, for people, society and nature.

Our speaker:

Samantha Walton is a reader in Modern Literature at Bath Spa University, where the focus of her research for the last five years has been the link between nature and mental health. In 2016, she won a major research grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a two-year project called ‘Cultures of Nature and Wellbeing: Connecting Health and the Environment through Literature’, and she was a Writing Fellow at the prestigious Rachel Carson Centre in Munich. She is also a poet, and her collection Self Heal was one of the White Review’s books of the year in 2018. @samlwalton

Sadly Caro Clarke is no longer able to host this launch, Covid has struck again! But we'll make a wondrous night of it anyhow :)

*This event may take place in the garden. We have giant parasols to protect from rain and a number of blankets as well as a few heaters, but do dress very warmly, and bring extra blankets if you can. The garden is accessed through the tenement block which has steps on both sides sadly making it unaccessible to wheelchairs (unless carried at the back)