Ursula Buchan

Try forest bathing – by day and night – to ward off depression

Peter Wollheben and David George Haskell urge us to immerse ourselves in woodland and inhale the scent of trees for health of mind and body

Forest bathing in Japan. Credit: Alamy 
issue 18 September 2021

Ever since a consensus emerged that trees and, by extension, their ecosystems, were both vastly interesting and badly threatened, great tottering logpiles of books about woods or individual tree species have seen the light of day. Of these books, one of the most influential has been The Hidden Life of Trees (2018), written by Peter Wohlleben, who for many years has looked after a forest in the Eifel mountains in Germany.

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