Episode 343: Lines Across the Wild

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SARAH WILSON: This is the Roots and All Podcast, and I’m your host, Sarah Wilson. Join me as I talk about all aspects of gardening with some of the top horticulturists from around the world.

 

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Hello, and welcome to this episode of Roots and All, where I’m speaking with author Nic Wilson about her memoir, Land Beneath the Waves. We delve into how her relationship with the natural world has provided insight and resilience in the face of chronic illness, and how our surroundings can shape and reflect our inner landscapes.

 

NIC WILSON: So my original career was as a teacher. So I trained in English at uni, went to Durham, started to teach up there because my husband was at the time a student doing a PhD up there. So I spent six years teaching in Durham. It’s a big comprehensive there, which was a fantastic experience, a really good learning experience for me. And then we moved down here when he got a job in London. So then I started working at Hillside 6th Hall College in Cambridge. So that was again, a great place to work there for six years.

 

And so it wasn’t until my son was born 16 years ago, I was looking after the children at home, wanted to do something for my own interest really, didn’t have very much time. So I did an evening course for 10 weeks with a local garden designer and absolutely loved it. And then did one half day a week course at the RHS level two, which I could get to because it was really close by in the time I had between nursery drop off and pick up. And absolutely loved that. So that kind of made me think that maybe I’d try and do something in horticulture.

 

So that was when I went then went on after that to do the Capel Manor two-year garden design diploma, which was a really interesting way of looking at plants. Completely new to me, but I did love the design elements. So I did a bit of local garden design for two or three years. But I also started writing a gardening blog.

 

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So as an English teacher, I’d done, I suppose, lots of, I think I’d underestimated how much creativity it involved. But obviously writing resources and working with students was fantastic in a creative way. And having not done that for several years when my children were young, I think I built up all this creative energy that I hadn’t been aware of. And I went to the Edible Garden Show, I think it was in 2015 with a friend of mine, and he wanted to go to the blog talk. So I went along with him because it sounded quite interesting. And I thought, oh, actually I think I’d quite like to have a go at this. So I started writing a blog and it just sort of exploded really. I was writing two or three hours every night. I think for those couple of years between 2016, 2018, I probably wrote about 50 or 60 articles. I loved doing it. I loved writing about the kids in the garden. I loved writing things about wildlife and trying to get people involved in that.

 

I guess that was a good kind of preparation for what I ended up doing later, although there wasn’t really a plan. So I won a competition at college with the God is World magazine and ended up doing some work experience for them. Somebody at the RHS looked at my blog, which kind of ended up as an online portfolio really, and I ended up doing some work for them. I just sort of fell into garden writing and through that into nature writing. But it’s where I was always meant to be, I think. I absolutely love it.

 

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And it feels like a real privilege to do things like writing for the Guardian as one of their about 30 country diaries across the UK. Because I get to write about the wildlife outside my back door. And that feels like a real privilege. I love writing that sort of stuff.

 

SARAH WILSON: It sounds idyllic, I have to say. But I think probably it’s fair to say that it’s not always been and continues to not be plain sailing. Your book documents your journey with illness. And I wondered if you could talk a little bit about the book. Because it is out now and already people are, I think, giving you a lot of positive feedback about it. Because it sort of touches the nerve with a lot of people. You know, it’s talking about a really important issue. So yeah, if you could just tell us a little bit about that book, that would be great.

 

NIC WILSON: Sure. So it started really as a book about six years ago, just about the local environment, about my garden, about the paths, the local paths that we used to call Snicket’s in the Northwest. When I was a kid, so I had a short piece called Snicket’s and published a few years ago. And I was just writing stories about the things I was seeing. I was researching some local botanists from previous centuries. But I came to the conclusion that it didn’t really hang together as a narrative, as a book. It was the first book I’d written. I didn’t really know how to write a book, but it wasn’t working.

 

And I decided I needed to bring myself into it because so much of the way one responds to the natural world, I think, is to do with your own relationship with yourself. And the world around you and your family and your upbringing and all those kinds of things. So it seemed natural to bring that in, but I found that really difficult. So I actually ended up doing a year’s diploma with the Institute of Continuing Education at Cambridge, because I wanted to have some support really in writing about myself, which is something I’ve never done. I’d written about books a lot and done a lot of work with them, sort of birds and plants, but never about myself.

 

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And so it ended up being a story about why nature has been so important to me and my family, I suppose, over my lifetime. And starting with my mum who had ME or CFS, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, from before I was born. But at the time, it wasn’t recognised. She was told she was a malingerer. She wasn’t given any support. And it wasn’t really until I started writing the book that I realised what an impact that had had on her and therefore on me as a baby and a young child, because she hadn’t been able to look after me, but nobody had given her the support that she needed to do that. It wasn’t her fault. And so I think that has had a big impact on me growing up.

 

And also when I then developed chronic illness, so I have celiac disease, which I’m on a gluten-free diet, but I don’t think it’s completely healed my stomach. I have problems with malabsorption, I think that lead to fatigue myself. And also I have adenomyosis, which is a bit like endometriosis. So that causes me chronic pain. And I’d spent quite a few years denying that. And the chronic pain only came on really later on, but the fatigue I’ve had since I was a teenager probably. And I was very much in denial because I was different from mom. And if I was outdoors sort of person, I wasn’t going to end up in bed, bless her. But that made it really hard to be kind to myself and accept who I was. And so I ended up as two people really, one well person and one ill person and never the two were allowed to meet.

 

So writing about it has been a really healing process. I went to counseling for a year while I was writing the book because I didn’t think I’d be able to do it without doing that. And so it’s been a process really of accepting who I am and accepting the difficulties that my mom went through and kind of accepting and moving on from that in a way.

 

SARAH WILSON: Yeah. And it’s interesting that you said about the kind of two people, the one that gets out in nature and the one that doesn’t, because I often ponder this because a lot of people kind of see nature and gardens as a real tonic and they find it’s something that bolsters them when they’re not feeling well. But I also wonder, can it exacerbate that feeling of not being well and that feeling of missing out? Because it is so apparent when you can’t get outside, this is kind of all my sense of loss that’s amplified by the fact that you are indoors most of the time when you’re not well.

 

NIC WILSON: Yeah, absolutely. I think I defined myself as sort of as a teenager and growing up, I tried to define myself as the opposite from my mom in terms of energy and things and as a sort of an outdoors person, not that there is any such thing, but that’s in my slightly warped mind, I think in that respect of things, that’s how I saw myself. And so when I wasn’t well, I wasn’t that pertinent, so I had to be somebody different. And then as soon as I was better again, I ignored the ill person and it really wasn’t a good way of living and not for people around me, I don’t think. And it completely negated and underestimated what my mum had dealt with as well.

 

So it’s been a really good opportunity for me to integrate those two people and to respect and admire both sides of me. I think I say at one point in the book that, I wanted to be proud of who I was in bed or out of it. And I feel that’s something I’ve really come to, which has been a really positive thing for me.

 

SARAH WILSON: I mean, it’s tricky as well. I think for people who the outdoors is their work, they’re living, again, it’s that difficulty of managing being able to get out versus being inside. But then, you know, you’ve got the writing stream, which I don’t want to assume anything, but perhaps it’s easier to do that when you’re indoors versus having the kind of opportunity to get outdoors. So there’s again, that sort of multiple aspects to the appreciation of nature and how you document your experience in it. So is that also quite useful?

 

NIC WILSON: Yeah, absolutely. And I love the research I do. So I’m starting on my second book at the moment, and the research I was wasn’t terribly well at quite a chronic pain last week. And I was kind of taken away on the research I was doing into sound, actually, in the animal kingdom and sound in singing voices, human voices. And so that is a great way to be taken out of it, I think, particularly when you’ve got an illness that you know, you can’t do a lot about yourself to sort of wait out in terms of my chronic pain.

 

And also, I think I find other ways to access the natural world that don’t necessarily involve leaving my bed. So having the windows open and listening to the birds, for example, watching the birds fly past, that’s something I document in the book. And I’ve done quite a lot of workshops, writing workshops with the Wildlife Trusts. One of the ones I did for them was focusing on people who might not be able to get out and try to think of all sorts of other ways to access the natural world, both physically through windows, but also imaginatively. That’s something I want to really look at in my next book, is how in those times where perhaps we can’t get out physically, our imaginations might do some of that work for us, perhaps if you’re the kind of person for whom that resonates.

 

SARAH WILSON: Well, yeah, exactly. I mean, it’s kind of adapting what you can do and just kind of finding ways to still be yourself whilst also enjoying all the things that you like doing. The other thing that I think was interesting was that through your garden design course and obviously your awakened or reawakened love of gardens, you also chose your garden as a place of medicine. How is that going and how do you manage that if you’re not able to get outside at kind of crucial times?

 

NIC WILSON: Well, it’s medicine in the sense that there’s wildlife out there and nature and that’s really healing because I love being in that sort of environment. So if I can get out into the garden, then I can see all sorts of things that really give me a lift.

 

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But also when I was diagnosed with celiac disease 17 years ago, I found it very difficult in terms of eating because I suppose because we used to go out and eat fairly regularly in restaurants with lots of different cuisines. I mean only locally. But I lost my love of eating and of cooking and it just made everything feel very restrictive. The garden was one thing I turned to, I think, to grow my own. My kids were also really small at that point or one was, and then my daughter came along. So I wanted to engage them with growing their own and with food and with vegetables, all sorts of different colors and shapes and sizes. And so kind of together, we went on this journey of growing things.

 

And it’s, I mean, obviously, I’ve grown stuff before, but this particular time in my life, it reawakened my desire to cook and my love of food. I grew quite a lot of ingredients for things like Thai cooking. So loads of chilies and lemongrass and all sorts of different herbs. It empowered me to be able to do my own cooking and I learned how to cook. I learned how to bake gluten-free pastries and everything except bread, which I detail my spectacular failures in the book. Although actually we have got a little bit further and my husband’s pretty good at that now. So the garden became a place of healing in all sorts of ways, which was wonderful.

 

SARAH WILSON: Yeah, you mentioned your failings with bread. I fail with bread and I can use gluten flour. So I don’t know what that says about my abilities. But although it’s easy to feel like you’re missing out because you can’t have certain things, what you’ve actually done is then developed a whole new way of looking at food and added to your kind of palette of ingredients. And when you grow your own, you are subject to things like gluts and you might grow things. Like you mentioned cucumber melons, you might grow things that you might not have grown before. And then you need to learn how to incorporate them into your cuisine. So I think that’s a really good aspect of growing your own. And it’s got that kind of added interest when you bear in mind the fact that you have to be gluten free in your diet. So if you were looking to encourage people, what kind of words of advice would you give if they are slightly nervous or reticent food growers?

 

NIC WILSON: I would say just go for it. Don’t worry about making mistakes. Everybody does, irrespective of how long you’ve done it for. Choose things that you really love to eat. And make sure that you’ve got an idea about how you use them. Because sometimes I find, particularly when I’m not well, I’ll grow things. But then once it gets to the harvesting, I perhaps don’t have time to do anything with them. And that’s a real shame. So yeah, start small, but don’t worry about it. Don’t think there’s a right or a wrong way to do it. I mean, obviously, you know, there is to a certain extent, but plants are pretty resilient and having a go is the important thing, I’d say.

 

SARAH WILSON: Yeah, I totally agree. So if you were, I was just going back to thinking about access to the outdoors and maybe the energy to get outdoors kind of ability. If you were not able to go on a walk or really immerse yourself in nature as much as you’d like, are there still other ways that you can appreciate it from the house?

 

NIC WILSON: Reading nature writing is something that I really enjoy. And then you can sort of have the vicarious experience of somebody else’s journey or whatever. But I think from the house out, birds are particularly important to me, as I mentioned before, you know, listening to them outside. So if you haven’t listened to birds a lot or you haven’t been aware of different species, then Merlin is a brilliant app on the phone. Not 100% foolproof, obviously, but you know, it was a really good starting point. So if you had the window open and you could hear birds singing outside, you could put the Merlin app on your phone and that would help you identify what you were listening to. Not that you need to, to enjoy the beauty, but sometimes that adds an extra aspect and gives you an idea of what’s living just outside your window or you know they’re living there already, but you didn’t know they were the ones that were making that particular noise. So I think that’s a really good thing to do.

 

SARAH WILSON: Yes, it is. I actually have the Merlin app and I went walking with Ralph, who’s a wonderful ecologist that lives locally to where I work, and it identified the nightingale singing, which I’ve never consciously heard before. It pinpointed the noise that they were making versus all the other birds that were singing at dusk. So the Merlin app is absolutely brilliant and I’m very excited by my nightingale observation because you also mentioned those in the book. I noticed as well that you were reading, your signature says that you’re reading a book at the moment about nightingales. And I thought, I don’t normally do this because I normally try and focus on your book, but you’re obviously really, really into your nature reading. And I wondered if you could give maybe a couple of books suggestions to people because most of the people listening will be nature fans and quite probably avid readers as well.

 

NIC WILSON: Yeah, sure. Well, that book that you mentioned is called The Nightingale by Sam Lee. And he’s a musician and he does the singing with nightingales where people go out with him into the countryside and listen to the nightingales. And I think sing along with them. I’ve never done it, but I would love to. I can’t make the dates this year, but I’m hoping next year I might be able to. If you’re interested in Rivers, another wonderful book that won the Wainwright Prize last year, I think, is called The Flow by Amy Jane Beer. And that’s her story of going back to Rivers. And 12 or 13 years ago, her best friend was killed in a canoeing accident. And so it’s about her relationship with water and about her friend. And that’s a fantastic book in terms of learning about rivers and the water in our environment.

 

And then I also love On Gallows Down, which is a book by Nicola Chester, who lives in sort of Berkshire area. And that’s all about her landscape and her connection to it and the wildlife that she sees there. Her writing is beautiful. Another one actually that I’m just reading at the moment, which is garden related, has just come out. It’s by Bonnie Landa Johnson, called Vanishing Landscapes, The Story of Plants and How We Lost Them. And that’s really interesting because it takes all sorts of different plants, apples, saffron, and it goes through the history of it. So if you’re interested in the history of plants, that’s, I’m really enjoying that at the moment.

 

SARAH WILSON: Oh, fantastic. Yeah, I really don’t need any more books on my book pile, but I suspect that one might be going on it now.

 

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Yeah, and reading the book, your book, I think sometimes if you do love nature, and you kind of love being out in it, and you’re really a champion of it, sometimes it’s hard to not get down, not just because you might be feeling not up to going out in it, or you might have your own stuff going on, but also because of wider things that are coming to bear on the landscape.

 

NIC WILSON: Yeah. And I think your book helps people to find positivity. Can you offer any words of advice for people who might just be kind of thinking under it all and going, oh God, you know, it all seems pretty dire?

 

Yeah, it’s so hard to keep the balance, isn’t it? And particularly somebody who spends a lot of time writing about the issues that, you know, it’s facing and we go out and we hear, you know, what’s happening to our wildlife. It is really tough. I think I came to the conclusion looking back on my book after I finished writing it, that the way I wanted to see it was as my relationship with the natural world being a reciprocal one. So all good relationships work both ways. And I think for me, if I’m looking at the positives and the joy and the wonder and all the healing things about nature, but I also feel I need to be really involved as much as I can in campaigning for things like the Peat Free campaign that I’ve been very involved in. And I curate the UK’s Peat Free Nurseries List on my website. And I volunteer with the Local Wildlife Trust and to the extent that I can. And obviously people can only do what they can. But I think if we try and balance those senses of the way that it can help us and then the way that we can help it, we can only do what we can do in our own personal ways, can’t we?

 

SARAH WILSON: Yeah, that’s a very good way of looking at it. And it’s good that you found causes that you can invest time and energy in. And that doesn’t have to be at a national or international level. That can be very local. And I think that’s worth remembering as well.

 

NIC WILSON: Well, it could just be having a conversation with your neighbor about something and then they notice it the next time. You know, all of these little bits help us, I think. And I was very keen that my book wasn’t billed as a healing narrative, partly because chronic illness is chronic because it doesn’t heal, but also because I didn’t want it to be commodifying the natural world. I wanted it to be about this two-way process. It’s about what love is really about, which is deriving support from the thing that you love and also supporting the thing that you love.

 

SARAH WILSON: So true. And sometimes you can get very hamstrung because you don’t actually know where to start. So it’s good that you’ve said, you know, you start with the smaller steps and just take each day as it comes, I guess, is the kind of idea behind it.

 

NIC WILSON: Yeah. And although we’re losing lots, there is still a lot around that’s marvellous that we can appreciate. And I guess that’s one of the reasons I love things like pavement plants so much, you know, because you don’t have to go very far to see them. And hopefully everybody’s got access to some interesting plant in the pavement if they stop. So, you know, the more we all see what’s around us, I think the more we realise as a society, how important it is and what we’ll lose when it’s gone.

 

SARAH WILSON: Yeah, absolutely. So my final question, what’s kind of next for you? What’s next for your nature journey? Have you got anything in mind?

 

NIC WILSON: I’m really looking forward to going, when I’m going around to various festivals and talks at bookshops, to talking to people about the book. Because one of the reasons I wrote it was because my mentor said he thought it might help people. And, you know, I’m putting myself on the page has not been a natural thing for me to do. I’m a natural introvert. But I also really enjoy getting into discussions with people about these sort of issues. So I’m looking forward to that. And I’m proud of the fact that four years ago, I wouldn’t have accepted I had a chronic illness. And now I’m contemplating going and standing on the stage at Olympia in London and talking to people about it. And I feel quite positive, although a bit nervous about that. So I suppose that’s one thing I’m looking forward to, sort of in my nature journey. But also I’ve started on my second book. And I’m really hoping that this, well, first of all, it’ll have a lot less of me in it, thankfully. But also I’m hoping it’ll be something that really helps people to see lots of different ways to access nature just outside their back doors. So I’m really excited about that.

 

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SARAH WILSON: Thank you very much to Nic for sharing her experiences. And thanks to you for listening, as always. If you liked this episode, you might enjoy episode 336 from a few weeks back with Green Gardening Revolutionary, Mary Reynolds. And episode 327 with writer and outdoor explorer Kerri Andrews. You can download or listen to the podcast direct from the website rootsandall.co.uk. Please also check out my Patreon, where you can make a one-off donation or take out a monthly subscription to help support the podcast. Because if you enjoy the show, please help it continue. I also have a GoFundMe where you can make a one-off donation. Even a one-off donation of one pound helps, and I’ll be really grateful for your support. So please go to Patreon or GoFundMe and search for Roots and All Podcast.