Fresh-Air pills

The health benefits of getting outdoors seem to be seriously in vogue at the moment.

My own village has just opened a ‘fresh-air gym’, which is meant for “youths and adults”:

Despite the fierce notice – “This is NOT children’s play equipment” – inevitably it has been much clambered over by small persons.  They have explored all the playground-possibilities to be had from fixed exercise-equipment, while grown-ups had to wait their turn to have a go.

Also in the last week, there was a research paper published on the efficacy, and dosage required, of self-administered NE therapy (‘nature experience’).  This was widely covered in the British press.  According to the study, “The efficiency of a nature pill per time expended was greatest between 20 and 30 min, after which benefits continued to accrue, but at a reduced rate.”  (‘Urban Nature Experiences Reduce Stress in the Context of Daily Life Based on Salivary Biomarkers’ – Mary Carol R Hunter, Brenda W Gillespie, Sophie Yu-Pu Chen, Frontiers in Psychology, 4 April 2019)

NE was defined for the purposes of the study as “spending time in an outdoor place that brings a sense of contact with nature, at least three times a week for a duration of 10 min or more.”  A Green-Gym session lasts considerably longer than that – though we don’t do much sitting around, and certainly not all day long.  Nevertheless, Green Gym could be designated one of our three ‘nature experiences’ a week, alongside the daily five portions of fruit & veg, eight glasses of water (or tea, coffee …) a day, etc?

For an efficacious NE, the researchers found, “You don’t have to travel to the wildlands.”  Which was just as well really, for today we travelled no further than a nearby village. 

The main priority there was a freshly re-opened footpath.  The line of the path had been cleared by a local ramblers’ group, under the direction of an Oxfordshire County Footpaths Officer.  Our task was to make it more pleasant to use.

The first thing to do was to have a coorie for potential targets. 

– Another new OED word there.  ‘Coorie’, noun or verb, Scots: ‘search, hunt, stalk’.  Green-Gym vocabulary is ever expanding, though we probably won’t have much use for what one of our volunteers clearly thought was a newly minted term (but actually Americans have got there first): ‘bloomage’.

There were some interesting splashes of colour – all right, bloomage – around us, on what was otherwise rather a grey day.  Bluebells and forsythia we can identify.  Can anyone help with naming these?

From the newly-installed public-footpath sign at one end, Green-Gymmers worked their way up the stretch of new path, smoothing and beautifying the way:

Some volunteers clearly found larger targets to tackle than others, and needed to deploy a range of tools.  I think the loppers in the snap proudly recorded by one Green-Gymmer below are just for size comparison!

Towards the top end of the path was an old post which needed removing.  First one volunteer had a go, then called for reinforcements.  Two strong men then pulled and heaved, and levered …

… to no avail.  Then it was three people on the job:

At last, result! and the inevitable posing for pictures, with the prize ‘catch’ before it was taken to the brash pile:

After that, besides the need for refreshment, it was time to collect up tools and re-group:

In the second half of the session, some volunteers turned their attention to the driveway leading up to the allotments – limited, of course, by having to look out for, and skirt round, ‘live’ birds’ nests:

Others donned hi-vis and returned to the roadway which runs parallel to the newly refurbished footpath.  This was where we had done our first Green-Gym job in that village.

Again there was encroaching vegetation to cut back, more dead wood to be removed, and dying wood to be freed from the grip of ivy.  Here a volunteer has a handsaw to old projecting roots, which were to be trimmed level with the ground:

Thankfully the rain which was forecast to turn heavy at mid-day did no such thing.  There was, however, enough of the wet stuff around to mean that today’s ‘after’ pictures are not the most spectacular: