Episode notes
No leaf is left unturned, not even a fig leaf, in this delightful and uplifting episode of the GoHealth podcast. Gillian talks to the director of the Conservation Foundation, David Shreeve. Take yourself outdoors to listen to it, if you can, and get some of the benefits that Gillian and David talk about here.
Some of the ground they cover includes:
- They discuss where the term wellbeing might have cpme from
- David describes his role as a director of a small environmental charity and working with the Church of England on Environmental Matters
- We hear all about the brilliant ‘Yews for the Millennium’ project that he pioneered around 2000
- David shares the frustrations and struggles of getting environmental issues taken seriously by the church.
- They share uplifting examples and ideas of how churches (and all faith buildings )are and could use their green space and gardens for therapeutic purposes and linking up with social prescribing by GPs.
- The blessing of the bulb
- Tracing the Millennium Yew Trees and researching the cause of old Yew Trees dying.
- The tree following clubs – what is your tree of choice?
- David shares his practices and pondering for leading a healthy, flourishing life.
Links:
Transcription
Gillian Straine: I am Gillian Straine and welcome to the GoHealth podcast. We are in season three of the GoHealth podcast and our theme for this season is exploring flourishing together. And we’ve got a great series of conversations to release over the next few months. So far, nearly 3000 people have listened to this podcast and we’re just so grateful and thankful to you for listening and for sharing it in your networks to get these conversations out there, conversations at the intersection of faith and health.
If you want to explore this further, how to flourish together further, do join our GoHealth Community for more discussion, resources and inspiration. Our tagline in the GoHealth Community is together we flourish. We basically continue what we start in these podcasts. Good conversations, exploring health and healing with faith, with inspirational people. So why not join the community? Join in the conversation and join us in flourishing. If you haven’t done so already, please rate and subscribe to the podcast. This really helps others to find us.
[MUSIC]
Gillian Straine [GS]: So welcome to the Go Health podcast. And in this episode I am delighted to welcome my friend David Shreve. Welcome to the podcast, David.
David Shreeve [DS]: Hello. Thank you very much for the welcome and for the invitation.
GS:Oh, good. Well, how are you and what are you up to today?
DS: Well, what’s happened to the weather? That’s what I want to know. But I’m looking out and it’s really grey and it’s now wet, so I’ve had to bring my bicycle inside. Any plans of doing much in the glorious sunshine have rather gone away? But I’m quite busy actually today, so I have to do an international webinar later on. But anyway, it’s about wellbeing and a better future, that sort of thing.
GS: And we were just having great chat there before we started recording on this word wellbeing. How old it is? I mean, has it always been around or is this a new term?
DS: It must go back to the first days of human beings, doesn’t it? I mean, there must have been some days when they woke up and felt good and others when they didn’t feel quite so good. And then they did something and they felt better and they suddenly, oh, I’m being well.
GS: Maybe, I think that maybe they’re more than most worried about where they’re going to get food and surviving. I think it’s kind of a western – well, we’re mostly quite secure in our food and in general, I need to feel better now. I think it’s, I don’t know, it feels like more of a lifestyle term. But you’re right I think, you know, there’s a sense of it, we’re created to be in harmony, aren’t we? And live well.
DS: I mean it’s a great title as long as people don’t use it automatically and say, you know, this is, this is for our wellbeing and it just becomes a word which is, as I say, taken for granted and loses. I think it looks it whilst it’s fresh. It’s rather good you know, I’m doing this for my wellbeing and you sort of know what you’re doing.
GS: Yeah. I guess that kind of moves us on to our topic as well because I guess one thing with bringing the wellbeing market, if we can call it that, into play with the Christian faith, is that Christians have always had a sense, because we imitate Christ, that it’s never just about us, it’s not just about my wellbeing, my faith, all the rest of it. Actually, we do live outwardly facing and part of being Christian is to care for others and care for the planet. And the reason I’m so delighted that you’re on our podcast and that we can chat and we can gather some wisdom from you, is you’ve had such a long career engaged, I don’t know, the right title, what would the right title be David, do you think? Green issues or I mean, how do you describe yourself? And can you just give us a quick overview of what you do? I want to get into the story, but right now, what do you do around your work?
DS: I mean, what do I do? I have sort of one main job, which is being director of a, of a small environmental charity. And then for quite a few years, I’ve been helping the Church of England with its environmental program. And I don’t know, you know, because I wouldn’t describe myself as a sort of an eco warrior by any means or even a greenie. I tend to say to people that I’m a mere PR man because that’s what I was doing before I came up with an environmental project and and I’ve used the PR side of me in many ways and, I think, to the benefit really of what I’ve been doing because…what can I say about Church House? It’s a sort of civil service organization and public relations you’d think would be automatic for the church, but I’m not sure that it is. And what I came up with, I’m sure some of the people, my bosses and colleagues, thought were a bit gimmicky. But, you know, the first thing I did that really made the church and the people in authority say, wow, well, this might be worth noting was a project called Yews for the Millennium, and my job at the foundation, I’d been sort of promoting the fact that Yew trees, especially those near churches, were really very old and needed to be looked after and better protected than they are. Than they were then and they are now, in fact.
This country has the world’s greatest collection of ancient trees. Now, there’s some debate as to what is ancient when it comes to a yew tree. But the ones we were looking at had been estimated to have been or are at least 2000 years old. And it suddenly dawned on us that not only were the trees often older than the churches that stood beside them, but in fact, some of the churches would have been around at the time of Christ. So, you know, that’s a hell of a thing for Christians to celebrate and have a share of. And so we came up with an idea, you know, would people want to plant a little tree or be it a cutting from a tree estimated to be around at the time of Christ and the Church of England said, no, we don’t like that. We, we want people to put candles in their windows and light them to welcome the new millennium. And we thought that’s okay, but it’s not like thinking of the future too much. And so I had to, I had to knobble the then bishop of Stepney and he loved the idea and said oh yes, yew tree, tree is a cross. And I thought, oh, I’m not sure about that. But anyway, we did a project and we gave away almost 8000 yew trees and we gave them away at special services. Most of them were in cathedrals, and people came in large numbers to collect a little tree. Some people said, we’re coming to the service tomorrow to collect yew tree. What sort of transport do we need? Well, actually, you get given a Waitrose carrier bag to put it in, so you’ll be all right.
GS: I love that it was Waitrose – that’s very Church of England. Yeah, no, no. We we went along. There’s never any money to do things for the Church of England. So we had to go for…we were introduced to a man called Peter Jones, who was in charge of Waitrose Bags for Life, and they printed a wonderful picture on the carrier bag with a yew tree, an ancient tree. And so there’s no mistaking that you had, or come the day, you’d been to your local cathedral and got your yew tree. And I’m just thinking we actually didn’t do Salisbury Cathedral. We were on top of Old Sarum and a wonderful bracing wind, which I remember the the Bishop brought some of his suffragan bishops a few extra bishops from Africa that they had visiting. And they came up over from under us at Old Sarum and all their cloaks and robes were flowing…it was amazing. Talk about the horsemen of the…or whatever it is. But, am, and we had a Salvation Army band, God bless them. And they played their hearts out. We, we gave away the yew trees for the diocese of wherever Salisbury is, Dorset. And it was a wonderful, wonderful experience. And we really should do more things like that I think.
GS: You paint a very evocative picture. I can just see these bishops ascending the hill. Do I detect a little, I mean, it sounds like a bit of a battle. I mean, if you’re going to the church as a PR expert with a great idea. What an idea as well. I mean, trees older than Christ, outside churches, you know, that is a marketing, marketing moment if I ever heard one and people saying, oh, no, we want to do something else. Have you found this across your career, campaigning for environmentalism? And what we can do about it …is it a battle and as well.
DS: Well it’s certainly frustrating. And, you know, you and I share the fact that we’ve both published books about the church and the environment, or at least you know how to look after your church on an environmentally friendly way. And the easiest thing is to have an idea about a book, the next easiest thing is to write it but real difficulty is to sell things the damn things, and you know, what can you do? You, you talk to the editor of the Church Times and he puts something in his paper. But, you know, you’ve got to get the book into the hands of people who will then read it, first of all, and then say…you know, we’ve got a boiler like that or we’ve got…we could do something.
GS: Yeah.
DS: And and it is really difficult. I mean, people talk of the Church of England as if it was, you know, an organisation. They forget that, you know, it’s 16,000 independent organisations really, who make up their own rules. And if they’ve got a musical enthusiast, you’ll get a choir. And if you’ve got someone who cares about young people, you’ll get a youth club. So you’re waiting for someone who has a thing about the environment. And, you know, I would say, how do you describe me? But, you know, environmentalists can be pretty difficult people and and odd in many respects. And in the church, before I came along, there were plenty of environmentalists within the church, Christian Ecology Link and people like that. But, you know, they all tended to sit at the back on the left hand side. What we needed to do was to push them into the the main pews, the centre of the church. And I mean, we did that with the yew trees.
We did one give away in the Bristol Cathedral, where when we arrived Saturday afternoon, pouring with rain. And the Bishop was there and he was in such a bad mood, he said, who on earth organised this, you know, or a Saturday afternoon when City are at home? And he sort of saying, no-one will come and all this. And it was pouring with rain as well which didn’t help. Anyway, the cathedral turned out to be packed and we’d give it away all our Waitrose carrier bags, not a tree left it in the house. And the Bishop at the end was a changed man. He said, this is amazing. He said, I’ve seen people here this afternoon who I would never normally see in this place. And, you know, and he may have been one of the ones who went back or reported to synod or something and said, you know, maybe we should give away more trees and…and I just bang on about I think more churches ought to be outside on a Sunday morning watching the sunrise. I mean, what a wonderful experience.
We got a vicar near here. I’m not in this parish, so I can say what I like, I suppose. But he he’s a great guy and he does wonderful sermons. But he says the best service of the year is Easter Sunday. They they all gather at 6am and so they have a service and they see..well, sometimes I guess they don’t always see the sun come up, but they know it’s there and and then they have breakfast. He says that’s the best service in the year. Well, now, why couldn’t we, you know, use God’s world and the experience of seeing a sunrise as much more?
GS: I think it’s fascinating, I think because you and I been working on Green church stuff for years and years. And and it’s not about knowledge, is it? It’s about how do we support people to put it in practice? Am…and, and people find it difficult to do for all sorts of reasons. And I wonder whether part of that might might be that the threat we’re under at the moment with climate change is is so big that it almost, it almost doesn’t marry up, there’s some kind of cognitive dissonance between climate crisis or climate catastrophe and turn your heating down a little bit. You know, it’s quite a difficult, a difficult subject to engage with or get from the big issues right down to the personal.
DS: I mean, I think at the church at the moment and when we say the church, I mean, churches generally are aiming to do net zero at some stage. You know, in our present energy crisis, we’re all going to be doing – aiming for net zero simply because we can’t afford the power. And many churches will say, well, people used to come here with their thick coats on and we’ll go back to wearing thick coats to church.
I remember speaking at a Synod Diocesan Synod, and a lady got up and said to me, after I’d done my thing about, you know, living environmentally well and all that. And she said, ‘if you think I’m going to freeze on a Sunday morning in church, you’ve got another thing coming to you.’ She was not having anything to do with this cranky environmental thing of saving energy. And it’s you know, of course, she doesn’t want a freeze on a Sunday morning, she wants to be comfortable. But that’s the sort of attitude one has faced a lot. But I have to say, there are, you know, lights appear every so often that take away the doom and gloom. And I think quite recently…at the moment, I’m trying to get churches to set up gardens and we, you and I have talked about this before. Gardens for therapeutic gardening and linking it with social prescribing. So in other words, the GP gets someone coming in who just needs to sort of have some community involvement and the experience of gardening. Churches have got space and I’ve started to say about faith organisations – because I’ve been meeting Jewish people, people with mosques, and they said, ‘well, we’ve got a bit of space, we could do something’. So I have been doing, with the Church of England, well, basically with the church – certainly with the Church Times, something called Green Health Awards, giving awards to churches who would – using their space for therapeutic gardening.
GS: Yeah. And the Guild were always that very early on then as well. And I think I’d like just to get on to this, this issue of the links between the environment and health, because I was also struck with your story about the vicar whose parish you don’t live in, who had the best service of the year outdoors.
DS: Father Kevin, if you’re listening, we’re talking about you.
GS: Father Kevin, you have been name checked, we’re all going to turn up next Easter.
DS: Right.
GS: You know, because there’s something quite healing about being in nature. And we did a lecture last year with Ruth Valerio, who does a lot on environment and so on. She had this, this lovely line at her lecture that somehow being in nature heals our wounds and we sort of know it in our guts. I’m not sure what what we need to think about it. I’m not sure what actually happened, but I saw it so often. You get an experience when you go into nature. I know when I’m really stressed, I’m not coping. I need to go outside and I don’t really know why, I could come up with a theology about it, I imagine. But, you know, I know it in my guts that it’s that something about nature is healing.
DS: Yeah.
GS: And I wonder if that’s an angle that we can explore from the church perspective as well. The church is supposed to be there for healing now – maybe that’s such a better way in for helping people really engage with climate, climate change at the moment. It’s good for us because we need nature for our health.
DS: I mean, you say about going for a walk or being outside, a) fresh air is an amazing cure, I think, and also great advantage of gardening is getting your hands in the soil. Now, I don’t know, I think I’ve read somewhere some chemical reaction that goes on when you do that and that makes you feel good. But I mean, you do feel better. It’s sort of it’s such a basic thing to sort of make a hole in the ground and then putting in your acorn or whatever it is, bulb or seed and then you sort of smooth it over, don’t you? It’s it’s almost like giving a blessing, you know, in a way – that hand, you know, you don’t necessarily do it in the shape of a cross, but you do do it in a circle. Maybe that’s what we’re saying. You know, we’re all in this together and you make a ring around your bulb with your hand and that’s you – that’s you touching nature, isn’t it? Now, some people will say, well, I don’t want to garden, but you say, well, come anyway. Look, we’re there every Thursday. If you don’t want to do any gardening, you make the coffee and you know the church is opening its gates if not, its doors to the local community, whatever their faith is, or if they have no faith, because there are so many sort of lonely people living in high-rise or apartments that simply have no earth to touch. And the amazing thing is, you know, a lot of our faith buildings actually have illustrations from nature all over them. That church in the Euston Road that’s got pillars.
GS: St. Pancras
DS: That’s got ivy painted on the pillars isn’t it. Well what are they doing having ivy painted when they could have real ivy growing up.
GS: Yeah and you make me think about Saint Teresa of Avila, whose writings about the spiritual life involved a garden and, and and connection with God was a spring welling up in the garden as well – really clear environmental ways to understand God as well. You’re right, we have all these spaces.
DS: You know and some of them are…it’s just a yard at the back of the church. But if people put plants in pots and space them out and encourage them on one of the days during the week, on Sunday, you know, we’re all going to go outside after the service and have our coffee in our new garden and think how exciting that would be. And that could be, you know, rather than, say, the service ends in the church, you know, we’ll go outside and we’ll have the blessing out there because there we can get the air to breathe and we’ll be standing on the soil and we have plants around us. And this has been created not just by the people in our church, but we’ve made our space available to our neighbours.
GS: It’s interesting you say this. I’m involved in a church in London. It’s in a very well-heeled part of of of of the city, mostly full of hotels. And they’re just they’re just decided they’re going to use the the little garden they have to open up, aiming it for all the hotels, domestic staff and so on who work in these big fancy hotels, because often in these big, fancy hotels, there’s no space for the staff to have a fag or a cup of coffee. So they’re opening up their space in this very exclusive part of London saying, our beautiful garden is for the people who work here and make it beautiful with plants, maybe do some coffee and volunteering there as well. So it’s a kind of provocative social justice angle, really. You know, this is God’s land and it’s for all people.
DS: And I think that’s the sort of thing we’ve got to – that message needs to be got out to, you know, every church person to say, you know, there must be some where that you could create that sort of space, whether it’s for the hotel workers or for the elderly. I mean, there’s a wonderful church garden in Camden, which we gave an award to, which is actually being used by a local hospital. During lockdown, they ran out of space in the hospital so they actually said, look, can we use your garden as a consulting room? And once a week, some of their patients who, you know, they’re not normally allowed out, come out, they form a sort of crocodile and walk out to St. Paul’s in Camden Square and, you know they garden and it happens that they’ve chosen the day when the church has a midday mass and they leave the doors open and if some of the people from the hospital want to they can go in and join in the mass. So, I mean, the church is, is there and if the door is open, whether there is mass or not, people can just go in there and sit and think about what the church means to them. And it might start meaning more.
GS: And so often church doors are heavy. It’s hard to get through for all sorts of reasons. People, I live in Litchfield, which is very leafy, it calls itself a city, but it’s really a town. And you know, I’ve met people who’ve lived in Litchfield their whole life, but they’ve never gone in the cathedral because that’s for the cathedral type people, not for them. And it’s got very heavy doors – it’s difficult to get into. So actually getting people across the threshold is difficult, but you don’t have that threshold in the green space outdoors. It’s a place of welcome. Everyone has picnics there and so on. So they’re a huge resource actually for the mission of the church. We need to get out of our doors a bit.
DS: And we, we gave away our yew trees at Litchfield Cathedral Saturday Evensong.
GS: Okay.
DS: Now I don’t know how many people they get normally for evensong, but on that occasion they had a big crowd of people came for yew trees.
GS: Oh, really, wonderful.
DS: I remember they had the most grand and ornate brass lectern.
GS: That’s right. Yeah.
DS: And I think it’s one of those things that normally when they’ve moved it, they put a break, you know, they put the foot on something and it locks the wheels. And I don’t think they’d done that this time, because I remember doing my bit about the yew trees and leaning on the lectern and it felt as if I was going to leave the box I was standing in and make a real fool of myself. But anyway, I pulled it back and said behave.
GS: Disaster was averted. I once saw somebody preaching and they’d forgotten to put the steps on the pulpit and they just jumped up into it and then jumped back out of it. It was the most extraordinary thing. Oh, I wonder, that must have been before my time. I’m going to see if I can find out where these yew trees have gone in Lichfield.
DS: Well, we’ve we’ve tried we tried to celebrate one of the anniversaries because one forgets how long ago the millennium celebrations were. I mean, we’re now 2022, and some of those trees that we gave away are quite a reasonable size now. And I would love if any of your listeners say, ‘we think we’ve got a millennium yew’ to to let me know, because if we don’t continue to spread the word that in 2000, the year 2000, churches planted these, they’ll be forgotten. You know, congregations come and go and the people who registered with us, you know, a lot of them are no longer with us. But the trees are. And we don’t want them to be forgotten in a churchyard somewhere. We want people to, you know, at least once a year remember that they planted something that could go on growing for 2000 years more. And to celebrate that and it would be great to, you know, say, well, GoHealth is having an annual celebration where people gather around their Millennium Yews and thank God for all he’s given us.
GS: Right well, you’ve heard it here first. David has just given me work, more work!
[LAUGHTER]
DS: It’s an idea…
GS: It’s a good one. I love good ideas. But so if anyone’s listening right now and they suddenly remembered that they they’ve got a yew tree or they know somebody who did what can they, can they get back in contact with you or is there…
DS: Well it would just be nice to know, is it not, because I mean, trees are like us. They don’t all live forever and ever. And, you know, but some some get strimmed by the local council and they come to cut everything in the churchyard, of course. But they are, these are precious trees which a church is looking after. You could you could go to every Parochial Church Council (PCC) and no one would ever complaint that it would cost any money. All they want to do is after one of our services once a year go out, and it’s an excuse to pray around a tree. Now, that can’t be bad, can it?
GS: Absolutely. You sound like a man who’s been around PCCs for long time. This is why we need PR experts in marketing to kind of get out of there – because their buildings, people have responsibilities, people have different gifts as well. But you’re right, a good guide to remember these trees and what that means to the succeeding generations as well. I wonder what it will be like in 2000 years from now as well.
DS: Well, interestingly enough, there is a problem affecting ancient yew trees that we’ve discovered. And my foundation is going to put some money into research to find out what that problem is that’s causing very old tree yew tree to die. Because, I mean, just think about that – if there is something like Dutch elm disease is for elm trees or ash dieback for ash. If there is something that’s killing off ancient new trees and we associate old churches with old yew trees and it’s part of the heritage of this country, apart from the fact that it’s – this country’s got a unique collection of yew trees. Most of the old ones are in churchyards. We’ve got to do something. We can’t leave it to say, oh well, we gave 8000 new trees away for the millennium. We ought to say, hold on, we’ve just discovered this now, something that might kill them off. So a bit of money spent now, we might sort it out. And it might be, of course, caused by climate change. So maybe there is something we have to do to our churchyard trees to maintain our heritage. Now, someone out here that’s listening to us going on about this may have the answer or some ideas. I mean, we would love to hear from people because these these trees are really special.
GS: We’ll put all your links in the show notes for this podcast as well so people can contact you there. And who’s doing the research, David, that you’re funding?
DS: In our work with yew trees, we’ve discovered that there are a wonderful group of people called the ancient yew group and they give up their time, weekends and they go around and they sort of look after yews because, you know, the poor old church can’t afford to look after them. And the last thing we want is for the vicar to get a local farmer with a tractor and pull a thousand years or so of heritage and history down. So the ancient new group are experts in trees.
And an interesting thing, I don’t know if you’ve discovered this in your work, but we do a variety of projects with, with trees – that includes yew trees, elm trees, mulberry trees. And we’re now doing something about plane trees in London. Now, each of those trees has a following. And you know that we know people who are well, we know I know some people who are elm trees, but there are elm enthusiasts who go around looking at elm trees. And that’s a big thing. Other people – no we don’t want elms, we are yew people, andother people go on walking tours around London to see the mulberry trees of London. Now what is it makes someone an elm person or a mulberry person? And I would love to carry out some research on that because if we wanted to get a lot of people, we’d say, well, look, what’s going to turn the Christians onto yew trees? Because and then we’d get them all out checking their millennium yews, but there’s some magic something about a tree, and a particular tree that attracts a particular person.
GS: Aren’t human beings amazing? I mean, I had no idea there was such clubs. Would you say you’re a yew tree person, if you had to pick a club?
DS: No, I’m., I, I should have got into trees. I still sort of a never quite sure what sort of tree I’m looking at. I know a yew tree and I know the difference between a yew tree and an Irish yew, for example, which you get a lot of in churchyards. Elms, I really have to say…I think it’s an elm. We got into Mulberrys. I remember launching a Mulberry campaign for some trees in London, and I had to admit to myself and I didn’t tell too many people other than myself, I don’t know what a mulberry tree is. I’m not sure if I would recognise it. I think I would now, actually. But I mean, there are fascinating, they’ve got a fascinating story. And there are some people who would trek for miles in order to see a particular mulberry tree.
GS: Yeah. Oh, it’s amazing. Just amazing.
DS: Yeah. So I’ve had to I’ve had to adapt, you know, and say, of course I know…My latest thing, and I’ve just been photographed at a tree, which I’ve discovered. You will know Handel’s Largo, and that comes from an opera which is being performed in Holland Park this summer (2022). And someone from the opera company said to us, Oh, Conservation Foundation, I see you’ve done something about plane trees. This opera features a song, Handel’s Largo, which is sung to a plane tree and we’d like to sort of make a link. And I just simply wrote something that Handel lived in Mayfair, just up the road, Berkeley Square, wonderful plane trees. That’s what inspired him. Until I sort of wrote down the numbers and I’m not a numbers person at all. But anyway, it didn’t add up. The trees in Berkeley Square were not planted until about 70 years after Handel died. And then I checked out and London didn’t have any plane trees when Handel was around. And then I discovered that Handel, when he first came to this country, was offered a chance to stay in a house at barn elms, which is just the other side of the Hammersmith Bridge. And, and that tree, we know, was planted 2y years before Handel was born. This, this is London’s oldest plane tree. It’s also probably its biggest and it’s in the grounds – the house has gone – but it’s where Handel lived. And so I’ve said, I think there could be a link here with Handle lived in this house…he every morning he walked out to the plane tree and it really became something special for him. And when he had a chance in an opera to write about a tree, he chose a plane tree. And all these years later it’s still growing. And I gather a magazine in Broadway has just mentioned the possible link. Somehow they’ve, they’ve picked it up from somebody – I’ve obviously told somebody and the words got out but…so there you are Handel was a plane tree man.
GS: We’re going to need a whole season of the podcast on what kind of tree you are. I think I like all trees. I don’t think I’ve got any particular loyalty to one tree or the other. I don’t like to plane trees, plane trees are really messy in London.
DS: Well, a lot of people do – in fact, someone who worked at the Natural History Museum said to me, could you mount a campaign to get rid of London’s plane trees? He said, I’m a cyclist and come May, he said, It’s such an awful thing. And of course they are, they were introduced, that’s why we know exactly the story of Handel. You know, when the first plane tree was planted. And there are people who really don’t get on well when the pollen starts to fly around with plane trees. Hence the campaign to cut them all down. So, you know, it’s never easy in the environment.
GS: Not at all.
DS: You know, turn the boilers down and you upset ladies on the PCC and plant a tree… and I have to say, when I we started with the church and the yew trees people said, isn’t this a bit pagan?
GS: Yeah, that’s one of my questions. I mean, do you get that a lot, people thinking…
DS: I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think, you know, surely we’re all a bit pagan insomuch that we’re talking about nature and the benefits of nature. And we weren’t suggesting that churches would plant yew trees and then all the congregation would take their clothes off and dance around it or anything like that.I mean, maybe it would be fun if they did…that would never be that would get us into the popular press.
GS: Not for the right reasons. It’s interesting, because I do, I do a lot on social media broadly around, health, healing. We do healing courses from lots of different angles as well, and especially when we pay for advertising – Often the very first thing I do in the morning is remove the hate. So we get a lot of people saying this is rubbish, you know, it’s all placebo. And so there is a big anti-faith contingent out there that I sometimes I feel quite attacked by. But you’re right, people within the faith, I think it’s it’s it’s much less contentious, that that going to church might be good for you. You want to pray for healing because that’s very natural. And well, of course, having, going into a garden or gardening or being connected to nature is healing because God made all the environment too. So it’s God’s world. So it’s no surprise we’re made an image of God that we find a flourishing and a positive thing to be in nature. But sometimes I feel like we need the PR people to help us with this sometimes, because I feel the message is so vital right now with vast collective trauma from the pandemic and uncertainty with Ukraine and so on, there’s a lot of anxiety around, there’s a lot of fear, there’s lots of unprocessed grief.
DS: Yes, and and it must be very difficult for the clergy. You have people, you know.
GS: Yes.
DS: One thing, one damn thing after another, isn’t it, for clergy? And I don’t know how – well I couldn’t cope, but I mean, how they cope with the issues? And yet there are these sparks of light and hope and one happened to me just last evening. Just last evening when I was at a reception in the House of Commons, organised by Islamic Relief, and I was the only person from the Church of England there as far as I could see. And so I sort of felt I was representing a lot of Christians, but anyway, they were so pleased that someone from the Church of England had come to this reception. And I said a little bit about what I’m trying to do with health and church land and I said, but the thing is, this could involve you as well. You know, we’re not saying this is a Church of England project to bring therapeutic gardening to the land. You could have therapeutic gardens on faith lands of all sorts – outside the synagogue, outside the mosque, and the people from Islamic Relief said that it would be wonderful. ‘We’d love to join you in something like that’ – now wasn’t that fantastic. And then I said, well look, we’ve actually got the chance of doing a garden at the Chelsea Flower Show in the year after next. And we want to use it as a sort of a health wellbeing garden, if you like, but featuring the plants that you would find in the various religious books from all the faiths. Because this is not new, you know, we’re using wifi to do this recording. You know, new things have come along. But the knowledge of plants and their value to wellbeing and health has been known for centuries and has been recorded in our religious books. Now, wouldn’t that be a great project to work on for the Chelsea Flower Show – Jews, Muslims, Christians working together on a garden for wellbeing.
GS: That… it just… it sounds…I feel really moved hearing about that because I mean the early Christian monasteries they had the Greek, ancient Greek texts which told them all about plants and healing and so on. And from there we get the modern hospitals. And at the same time with the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, from the Islamic faith, doing just the same things as well. And I think it’s such a moment, given the trauma and the healing needs of everyone in our society, whether we can just concentrate on what we can do together about that, as well, that’s beautifully symbolic. And, you know, we all have to live on one planet let’s share our knowledge and celebrate that. That sounds really moving. David I needed a ticket to the Chelsea Flower Show the year after next. I really want to see this – this sounds really cool. What a thing.
So we’re coming to the end now and we always just tend to ask our guests, because you’re a man of faith, you doing this amazing work as well, but you are a man of faith as well. And I wonder if we can ask you how you keep healthy and what Christian healing means to you?
DS: Goodness, I don’t think I’ve got any words of wisdom on that subject because I am – It’s true, an hour ago I was having a Pilate’s session and so I think that’s my wife’s doing when she says, you know, you’re not standing up straight, I know someone who will sort you out. So I’ve got a straighter a back quite possibly. I find like everybody ups and downs and and it’s been a difficult time looking back over the past few years because not only – I seemed to avoid COVID, but right at the beginning I might have had COVID and people took it quite seriously that I had a cough and I had all sorts of tests done on me. But I do cycle a lot and I walk a lot and we’ve got a little dog and so I have to go out and give him walks. I really do…I, I have a sort of feeling that if you, if you have a good thought in your mind and it’s so easy to have bad thoughts, and I get terribly, terribly depressed at the news, but then we all do. And I just someone said to me last evening at the reception before I could answer their question, which was ‘how are you?’ And they said, you look very well. Isn’t that great? And if someone says that, I mean, they say you could be miserable or something, but in fact, no, last night I looked great. And so I remember that.
And it may be because I’ve been on my bicycle and caught the sun, it’s not that I’ve been sitting in the garden looking at the sun very much, and we have a tiny garden there, but we do live near the Thames. You see that means that at any time of the day, but particularly at the end of the day, I can walk down along the towpath and this is on the Thames between the sort of the end of the university boat race and Kew Gardens, where in that stretch of London called Strand on the Green and it’s just a joy.
I was asked by a magazine the other day to – ‘Where’s your favourite place in the world?’ And I thought, what is this… And I came down to Strand on the green in my local walk where the children used to walk along to school. And whenever it snows, we used to go out and see the snow falling on strand on the green and it’s my daily walk. How great to be able to say I do my daily walk at my favourite place. I can be in my favourite place every day.
GS: Wonderful, David, thank you so much for giving us your time in between parliamentary visits and international conferences and for sharing your story. I’m going to now google trees and try to work out what kind of tree person I am. I just find it so inspiring, the people you’re working with, the connections that you’re making, the struggles that you’ve got. I mean, thank God that you’re there, you know, encouraging grumpy PCCs and grumpy bishops…you know, they’ve got difficult jobs, sometimes they need people who are so positive like you. I think also, you know, that is a clear pearl of wisdom. I’m always looking for pearls of wisdom from other people – about being positive and saying good things to people, saying you look really well at somebody, saying something positive to lift people’s days. We can all be grumpy, but we can choose to be otherwise. And if we do it in the name of Christ, we can make the world a better place. I guess so. David, thank you so much. I’m so delighted that we’re friends and that you’re doing the work you’re doing.
DS: Pleasure.