Where I Go to Remember - What the natural world has taught me about observation, change and time

There are places on the land where something in me settles instantly. The moment I step into them, I feel myself shift — a softening behind the ribs, a loosening in the breath, an inner exhale that says: here you are.

It’s not a dramatic spiritual experience. It’s more like remembering a language I’ve always spoken.

People often ask where my connection to plants comes from.

It’s not simply a learned skill.
It’s not even just a profession.

It’s the place I return to when the world becomes too loud: a direct, steady relationship with the natural world that feels older than anything I could have been taught.

It’s source.

And it sits beneath everything I do.

Belonging Without Trying

There is a very particular sensation that arises in me when I’m close to wild spaces — not the curated ones, but the ones that have been left alone long enough to find their own rhythm.

It’s a sense of belonging without performance.

Standing among trees, or next to water, or in a meadow humming with insects, something in me feels mirrored. The land doesn’t demand anything. It doesn’t hurry. It doesn’t judge. It simply is.

And something in me responds to that.

My breathing changes. My shoulders drop. My thoughts become quieter. Sometimes I don’t notice how much noise I have been carrying until I step somewhere wild and feel it begin to fall away.

This is why nature is not simply inspirational to me.

I experience it physically.

Source Is Sensory

When I talk about source, I don’t mean an abstract spiritual idea. I mean something directly felt.

The shift in my lungs when I walk under trees. The warmth behind my sternum when sunlight moves through branches. The way my breath naturally deepens near water. The settling in the back of my body when I sit on the earth. The coherence that returns to my thoughts when all I can hear is birds.

I have learnt to pay attention to these changes.

Perhaps this is part of why I have become so interested in the language of the body. Long before I began asking clients what had changed in their bodies, I was noticing what changed in mine.

Nature gives me somewhere quiet enough to hear it.

The Land Has a Different Tempo

I have spent years observing how my own body changes across the seasons.

Spring brings a sense of alertness and curiosity. Summer feels expansive. Autumn draws something inward. Winter asks for something entirely different: stillness, depth, less.

What I eventually realised was that nature is not somewhere I visit.

It is a rhythm I return to.

The natural world has also taught me something about timing. A plant does not flower because we want it to. Roots develop unseen. Seeds wait. Growth happens in bursts and pauses. What appears dormant may be doing something important beneath the surface.

I think that has influenced the way I work more than I once realised.

I am less interested in forcing change than I am in understanding what is happening, what preceded it and what conditions might allow something different to emerge.

Nature teaches patience extraordinarily well.

I Am at My Best Near Water

Everyone seems to have a landscape that calls them.

Mine is water.

Not necessarily the crashing sea — although I love the coastline — but quieter water: a spring emerging from chalk, the slow bend of a woodland brook, the dark stillness of a pond beneath trees.

Water shows me who I am when I’m not trying to become anything.

Perhaps that is why I am interested in what lies underneath the obvious. Water invites you to look below the surface. What you can see is only part of what is happening.

There are undercurrents. Movement. Stillness. Things carried from somewhere upstream.

Health can be like that too.

What is happening now has a history.

Plants Don’t Speak in Words, But They Do Speak

This is something I have rarely tried to articulate publicly, but the truth is that I experience different plants very differently.

Chamomile softens me the moment I crush it.

Nettle wakes my boundaries.

Rose steadies my heart.

Hawthorn feels like an invisible hand at my back.

Mugwort sharpens something in my perception.

Cleavers make me think of movement.

Linden unfurls my breath.

I don't need to turn those experiences into scientific statements for them to matter to me. They are part of a relationship with plants that has developed over many years of growing them, gathering them, preparing them and working with them as medicines.

Plants are not simply ingredients in my dispensary.

They have been some of my greatest teachers.

What the Land Has Taught Me About Looking

The longer I have worked as a Herbalist, the more I have realised how much my clinical thinking has been shaped by years of observing the natural world.

In nature, nothing exists entirely in isolation.

A dry summer changes the soil. The soil changes what grows. One plant flourishes while another struggles. The insects change. The birds respond. What happens next is connected to what happened before.

You learn to look at the whole picture.

You learn to ask: what changed?

And then: what happened after that?

Those questions now sit at the heart of my clinical work.

When someone comes to see me with several apparently unrelated symptoms, I find myself doing much the same thing. I am looking for chronology, relationships and change over time.

What was the landscape like before this happened?

What altered?

What appeared next?

What keeps returning?

The land taught me to look for patterns long before I had a name for what I was doing.

Returning

Whenever I feel scattered, overwhelmed, stretched thin or disconnected, I go back to nature.

Not to escape.

And not necessarily to find an answer.

I go to remember.

To remember what my own body feels like when there is less noise around it. To remember that everything has a season. To remember that not all change can be hurried. To remember that looking closely often tells us more than looking harder.

This relationship with the natural world existed before Oxford Herbal, before my training and before The Turton Method®.

Perhaps that is why it continues to sit so quietly underneath all of them.

Connection to source is not an event.

It is a continual returning.

And every time I step onto the land, I return a little more fully to myself.