Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild

Gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant thing you can do, especially in the city

extolling the virtues of growing plants, and described it as ‘the marriage of the human psyche with the Great Mother’.14

greener neighbourhoods that offer a connection with nature might actually reduce the health gap between rich and poor and lead to a better, more equal society.

Jung’s solution was that every person should have their own plot of land to allow the primitive instinct to come to life again.

If an environment is equigenic, it may reduce the gap between the rich and the poor by weakening the link between socio-economic inequality and health inequality. Because of their many health benefits, natural environments are potentially equigenic.

anthropologists Gary Paul Nabhan and Sara St Antoine to believe that the biophilia gene needed to be triggered.

Wild swimmers often report improvements in depressive symptoms and an increase in the ‘animation and vigour’

contact with natural environments during pregnancy or the neonatal period results in a lower prevalence of allergic disorder, which is connected with regulation of the immune system.

how to create grass-free lawns and suggests red flowered daisies (Bellis), white flowered buttercups (Ranunculus) and bronze-leaved bugle (Ajuga) as examples of plants that would work in the climate of Western Europe.18