Wild Ways Well Winter Blog

A blog for NHS Lothian Charity by TCV Senior Project Officer, Paul Barclay

Winter, and especially December/January can be a difficult time of year for many people. The nights are long, dark and cold, and even in the daytime its often dreich and dreary outside. The trees are bare, the birds are silent, the bees, butterflies and flowers are gone.  Add into this the social expectations to be ‘jolly’ for Christmas, the parties and social gatherings that many find difficult, and the two huge time markers of Christmas and New Year looming over everything… its no wonder that some people get anxious and depressed.

It’s not unusual to feel like this, in fact research shows that issues like depression and anxiety do spike at this time of year. For many people, the happy, jolly, face that they put on is just that, a face, a front, for the world to see and to fulfil the expectations of those around them.

Research also shows however that there are some simple things that we can all do to combat the winter blues, and one of the best ones is to simply go outside! It may not be attractive looking out the window at the drizzle and the grey skies, but getting outside amongst nature at this time of year can actually be incredibly rewarding.

Our ancestors knew this, many of the festive traditions and events that go on at this time of year are rooted in activities from go way, way back in our history. Lighting fires and candles, celebrating evergreen trees, coming together as a community to help each other through the dark of winter. The traditional Scottish story of the Cailleach Bheur, the witch of winter, who teaches us to cast aside the things that are no longer helping us in life, and to look for, and guard, the seeds of hope for the future is one that we often tell on our walks and sessions.

Our Wild Ways Well project is also rooted in this tradition of communities coming together for a common purpose, to help one another, and to celebrate the world around us. There are so many beautiful things in the natural world – some of which can only be found at this time of year – and going out and experiencing them together is at the heart of everything we do.

We’ve made winter wreaths – each with a positive wish, or message, for everyone at its centre – which we hung on our ‘cloutie’ tree in Howden Walled Garden, just next to St John’s Hospital. Community members and volunteers, as well as staff and patients from St John’s helped us with this, and we hope that they bring a wee smile from those visiting the garden. Each wreath is an individual message, we learned the traditional meanings behind plants like holly, ivy, birch, beech, lime, pine, yew and willow and weaved these different twigs and leaves together to make each of our wreaths unique to ourselves. My own wreath was made from Ivy (which stands for nurture and love); Birch (for renewal); Willow (for the wisdom to endure hard times) and Lime (which represents my love of the land). Of course I also added some holly – which gives fairies somewhere to safely live amid the protection of its spiky leaves!

We’ve also celebrated the Solstice, the shortest day, where the winter sun sinks below the horizon for the last time, and the new summer sun is born. We lit a fire, roasted chestnuts, drank hot spiced orange juice and reflected together on the year past and our hopes for the year to come. While we did this, ravens were circling and calling in the woods, nuthatches, and scores of little birds were visiting the feeders and we watched squirrels playing in the trees. We also saw the flowers on the hazel trees, the first hints of daffodils and snowdrops poking through the ground, and the fresh buds of new leaf on the trees, ready to burst into life as the summer sun rises. We celebrated the world around us, and our place within it.

In our weekly sessions with both the public and with staff and patients from St John’s, we’ve planted daffodils and colourful winter flowers, pruned the apple trees, made an arty spoon flowerbed, looked for hedgehogs, found fungi, learned to identify trees and birds… and drank a lot of hot chocolate!

Don’t worry if you missed these events, there are plenty more still to come! In the early new year we’ll be wassailing the apples (it’s hard to describe, you sort of have to be there!), taking part in the annual Big Garden Birdwatch, going on snowdrop walks and planting trees in the local park. We’ll also have our weekly garden volunteers and our noticing nature sessions and nature walks.

Winter is not a time of year that should be feared or avoided. We should embrace the lessons that our past tell us, this is a time of reflections, thanks, hope and renewal – and after all, without winter we can’t have a Spring!