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Real people share real stories of their dialogue with Nature. Hear how it feels to talk with animals, birds and landscape. Share the magic of cross species communication.
Created by award winning Nature writer and poet Estelle Phillips.
Instagram @estelle_writer44
TikTok @EstellePhillips
Amanda Woolwork was celebrity guest when nature talks with humans recorded a special live podcast at Blandford Literary Festival. This is a fantastic opportunity to hear Amanda speak about her deep connection with the landscape. There are moving stories from the audience, a postman who had an epiphany, an ecologist who spent months in solitude in the jungle and received messages from trees, a gardener on the Sharpen Estate, and we hear about the climate coaching alliance. Amanda starts with telling us how she came to be curator at Sherborne House.
Amanda Wallwork:The building had become empty, because it had been a school, and it belonged to the Dorset Council, and it'd been empty for some time. And a group of people got together because they wanted to turn it into an arts center. And somehow I got involved because we thought we'd put on an exhibition there. And I kind of got involved just as an artist getting involved in an exhibition. And it went from strength to strength.
Amanda Wallwork:And eventually, I kind of became artistic director of this whole program. And that's where I discovered that I actually enjoyed curating as as well as just producing my own work. And we had this building to work with. It was still looked like a school. It was full of old desks and blackboards and all sorts, but it was quite a place.
Amanda Wallwork:And we were trying to raise money and turn it get it. Anyway, long story short, I mean, the program developed, and it was fantastic. Used to get lots of arts council grants. And then the Dorset Council decided to sell the building, so we all had to get out. And they sold it to a developer who developed the housing on the back land at the back.
Amanda Wallwork:It changed hands again, and the next person who bought it has now turned it into a kind of arts center now. It's recently reopened as the Sherborne, and it's been completely redone in terms of interiors, loads of money spent on it, and it's now beginning a new kind of arts program. So I was part of the earliest incarnation that went on it ended in 2008 when the building was sold. That formulated my curatorial career, which has been parallel with my art my art career as
Speaker 3:well. So
Amanda Wallwork:but that was quite quite something actually because I learned I learned on the job. I learned how to do that by just doing it and then working out how you did arts council applications and how what you needed to do and all these sort of things. So that was that was that part of the journey. But my real journey in terms of art started when I was a little girl. I lived in London with my parents.
Amanda Wallwork:My father's a ceramicist, Alan Warwick. He's quite well known son in the this is in the sixties. And there was a lot of studio ceramics were beginning to be the thing rather than the the pots that were made as functional objects. Studio ceramics started which is more sculptural ceramics, where we're making things as objects in their own right. And so he was at the forefront of of that at the time in the sixties in London.
Amanda Wallwork:But we used to come to Dorset as a family to visit. There were friends down here and things like that. And when I came, I just thought, wow. I was just completely blown away by the landscape. I'd never seen big landscapes like this before because having, you know, obviously, was in Greenwich and I mean, Greenwich Park was great, but, you know, I was in a town and that's what my experience of life was.
Amanda Wallwork:So coming on trips to Dorset was just like amazing. And he would particularly take us to archaeological sites. A lot of the places I mean, it started with things like Stonehenge, obvious ones. But as we were spending more time in Dorset, there was a lot of hillforts, lot of hills and sites archaeological sites. And I just was blown away.
Amanda Wallwork:And I was only, you know, young, but I was fascinated by these. And we eventually moved. And he moved his studio to Dorset in I was about 10. So the whole family moved to Dorset when I was about 10. And therefore and I was just like, this is amazing.
Amanda Wallwork:I've got this land out there that I can explore. And also this sort of things about hillforts and things like that was this these big sculptures in the landscape. Someone people made these out of the landscape. They reshaped hills and they left their evidence of what their lives in this landscape. And I was fascinated by this.
Amanda Wallwork:And this is all the time I was a little girl, I was fascinated. And I never knew what I was gonna do when I grew up. Eventually, well, in a way, suppose, because my parents were artists, I thought that's what you did. I thought that's what everyone did. I kind of didn't think that I wouldn't do that sort of thing.
Amanda Wallwork:I then realized that, obviously, when you went to school and you had to do o levels and stuff like that, I thought and they tried to make me be a bilingual secretary, and I thought, what's that all about? But I persevered against quite a lot of opposition, actually, not from my parents. And usually, lot of artists have the opposition from their parents who want you to go and get a sensible job. I get it more from teachers who said, oh, you won't want to waste your time doing art when you're so academically capable. You should be doing x when I when why are doing wanting to do the art?
Amanda Wallwork:But I said, no. No. I don't wanna do anything else. I you know? So anyway, I persevered with that and went to art college.
Amanda Wallwork:Didn't really know what I wanted to do with my own art. My father's influence was quite strong because his work was around was about instead, it was about archaeology initially, but then became much more about natural forms, pebbles, shells, fossils, plant seed heads, and things like that. So that was his influence. Obviously, that was very heavily influenced myself, but I really didn't want to keep I couldn't do what he did, and I hadn't found my own voice with what I wanted to do at all at that stage. So I went to college, did all the sort of things I do, and I started doing I did children's books initially when I came out of college.
Amanda Wallwork:The the one the particular one was called No Dodos, which was an accounting book for children, which was about endangered species. So if if you like, in a way, that was probably a first sort of brush into that kind of world. So it was a literal counting book of, you know, two two tigers, three pandas, whatever. These were all so and and and ended with with no dodos as being an extinct species, and the it was talking about how species become extinct and raising. This was back in the nineteen nineties, so it was early days, really, for things like that.
Amanda Wallwork:Anyway, that was one thing I did. From that, I then really developed my own particular direction with my art, which initially was archaeology, which was looking at the landscape from above. What you could see from above, which you can't see on the ground, which is revealed through a lot of it through aerial photography, but nowadays they've got these different remote sensing technologies that can do it through LIDAR and all sorts of different things that you can and because all the traces of what's happened in the past are still there in the landscape. They become evident by the way that plants behave in the sense of there's been a trench dug somewhere in the past because of there being a roundhouse or a barrow or something like that. The depth of soil will change, and that will mean that plants will grow taller or shorter.
Amanda Wallwork:And it's barely discernible on the ground, but you can see that from above. And you can read the landscape. You can read the stories of landscape by how what the marks we've left behind, and what interpreting those, but how nature actually responds to those marks and gives away these clues to what's there. So this really developed this fascination with landscape. And and then from the archaeology, I got more and more interested in what was below the ground and how geology has such an impact on everything that's above ground.
Amanda Wallwork:By this time, I'd been living in Sherwoman area for a while, but I was going down to this coast a lot. I went out on a boat trip. This is in the early days when the Jurassic Coast was about to be declared a World Heritage Site. So there was a lot of kind of focus on looking at the coast. Went out on a boat and looked at back at the land, and and it had this one of those sudden realization things that, oh my god, all this what because when you're looking at the cliffs, what you're seeing is all this time, millions of years of time in the rocks.
Amanda Wallwork:Normally, don't see it. We're walking a road, we don't think about what's underneath. But when you go to a quarry, which is the other way you can do it, but also go to the coast and see the cliffs, the colors of all the rocks, all these layers of the strata of the rocks that if you can if you walk along the coastline, you can see or you go up on a boat, you can see. This realization of for all those rocks represent past landscapes. So all those rocks, the sedimentary rocks in Dorset, are all made from the landscapes of the past millions of years ago.
Amanda Wallwork:So each one of those rocks, that layer, represents millions of years. I started getting really fascinated by this and did a project once with where I had some of the rocks, not in Dorset but in other place, rocks scanned to look at look at the detail, the microscopic detail of the rocks. And the the geologist that was talking to me about them said, and this is because this process happened then and that happened then. And I said, my god. That data, just in terms of any kind of data storage today, those rocks contain the data that we can uncode those landscapes of the past.
Amanda Wallwork:We can tell what lived then. We can tell what process was in. We can tell the climate. And I just thought that's absolutely extraordinary. But it was the colors that was really striking.
Amanda Wallwork:When you're and Dorset is extraordinary because it has such a varied geology. The colors of the rocks all relate to the circumstances in which they were formed in, but these colors in themselves became a fascination of the color of time. So I had a whole series of work with them about how the colors represent a period of time. And then you could have your own color code of time, if you like. And in a way, geologists with their geology maps had to find a way to differentiate rocks, and they chose a color system for this.
Amanda Wallwork:Originally, they started doing colors that looked like the colors of the rocks, then realizing there were too many. You couldn't there's so many different grays. You couldn't make enough differentiation. And there's now a universal system, is used across the world, of color coding. And they're quite bright colors now because they have to be differentiated.
Amanda Wallwork:And they're also slightly analyzed in terms of a percentage of color so you can reproduce them. But this idea of working with maps and geology and the color of time and how you can interpret time became a fascinating thing in its own right. I did a lot of painting based work on that. But I'm more interested in what it's all about, why is it like that? So beyond the aesthetic, understanding how it's formed, what it means, or how that impacts on us today and how we impact on it.
Amanda Wallwork:And I had this wonderful opportunity. I was commissioned by at the time, it was Dorset Area Of Outstanding Natural Beauty. I think they're now Dorset National Landscapes. They were doing a series of walks about discovering the landscape, and I was commissioned to do a series of maps of these walks. And my concept for the maps was to look at how the geology underneath your feet had an impact on what you were seeing as you were walking that landscape.
Amanda Wallwork:So the maps so these colors, these show the different rocks that were the different rocks that are underneath your feet. And as you walk the route, when you change from one area to another, there are clues in the landscape. Whatever the rocks are determines what the soil is, and what the soil is determines what the plants that grow are. What the plants grow determine what the insects are. What the insects are or whatever determine what the mammals are that, you know, that eat those insects or whatever.
Amanda Wallwork:And likewise birds and everything. So everything really comes down to what's under our feet. Those rocks really make a difference. So that's why you get some areas, you get bracken, and some areas, get short limestone grassland, for example, which has its own ecology. So all these different landscapes, all determined by the rocks below, determine the ecology of what it is that you're experiencing.
Amanda Wallwork:And this is why it gets quite fascinating but also difficult when we're talking today about things like biodiversity loss and how we recreate nature in other places. This is something that's coming up in the in the new planning laws as well. It's like instead of trying to save a bit of nature there, oh, we'll put a bit of nature over there instead. You put money into this fund that puts this bit of nature over there. And this sort of something is something that troubles me because it's it's thinking that nature is something that you can just sort of move from one place to the other and just recreate it.
Amanda Wallwork:It's not look, it's like it's like decorating a room. You know, you can redo it in a different style, and you can bug any old wildflower seed somewhere and it will grow without realizing, obviously, there's a huge relationship between all these different layers of things that are all interconnected. The interconnected of the things are very significant. So anyway, these maps so there there are particular areas that they gave me to work with, and it's all the South Dorset Ridgeway, which is sort of Weymouth, Dorchester sort of going towards Abbotsbury area. And what I've done on the maps is the colors represent the rocks, and then I've added little things like the archaeology that you might find en route, whether it's a round barrow or hill fort, but also other little information like butterflies may be seen here or this is where you might find this.
Amanda Wallwork:And accompanying the maps is a little field guide, which talks all about the how it the rocks influence the nature, but also how you can read that landscape. So things like the old trackways, where they are. Because before the current modern day roads, before we had the technology and the mechanics to basically move landscape and do what we wanted with it, we responded to what was there. There's little that we could impact on because we didn't have the tools. We couldn't change much.
Amanda Wallwork:We might cut down trees, and you might re dig a channel for some for some water or something like that, but you didn't move a whole hill to create a motorway. So and that's why houses at the time, you know, were also built out of the stone for the local quarry. You didn't have the transport to transport at great distances. So that's why in Dorset, you get that distinctiveness of different villages look very different because they're built out of the local quarry the Stokelestone, which is formed out of the local landscape, and so they look like that area. And you can go from one village to another.
Amanda Wallwork:They can be very different because the stone is very different. And in areas without stone, you get a lot of clay and you get bricks. So there would be brick producing areas. So if you look at, like, where were brickworks? Where were that?
Amanda Wallwork:It's because then you think, oh, that's that's clay. There must be clay in that area because they would use local materials. So you start reading what's on the surface and then you can go around and below. Or you can go from what's below and read up to the surface of what's what you're seeing there. And so when you walk landscape as well, which is very different from just driving through it, Trackways and lots of pathways follow ancient routes.
Amanda Wallwork:And there are a lot of the most ancient routes are the ones that go along the top of the downs, the chalk downland because the travelling was on the higher ground because it was drier. And on chalk, it was drier than the valleys full of clay. So these ridgeways were really important transport, trade routes, and just communication routes. There's a network of those across the whole of the country, and they're really, really important. Today, they mostly exist, but still just as trackways, not as roads as such.
Amanda Wallwork:Although some have incorporated into roads, some in our footpaths, and that and you can still walk a lot of them, which is great. But when you walk that landscape, you experience that landscape from the perspective of the landscape, not what we've imposed on it because you're you get a sense of the gradient. You get a sense of the plants around you. You get much more of a sense of what's ahead than the navigation. What are we looking for?
Amanda Wallwork:What is it that I'm aiming for? And the other thing with these maps is I've put the names of the fields on them. And you can and the tithe maps of the 1800 eighteen hundreds record all the names of the fields in every area. And these names have evolved from trying to describe that field. So, for example, a farmer needing to go and, like, plough they need to be able to describe which field it is.
Amanda Wallwork:And so fields that had names, sometimes those names reflected the geology, like Redfield or White Hill or something like that. And it's because that comes from something about that land in the first place. And if you look at if you know about words, can work out things like to do with it, if it was marshy ground or difficult. There's a lovely farm near Abbotsbury called Labor In Vain Farm. The Good boy.
Amanda Wallwork:Labor in vain.
Estelle Phillips:Labor in vain.
Amanda Wallwork:Because the soil there was so stony and difficult to work. And so there's lovely little clues in in just the words that are used to describe different landscapes. And by looking at all these layers of information from the old tithe maps, present day village names, and such, and where they originate from, you can really get a sense of why things are where they are. And I love the there was a situation where I I was used to go down to Cornwall a lot and go to different archaeological sites, you know, the famous ones, Mentoll and various things like that. And then I realized that there was this trackway across the moorland, and if you weren't followed that trackway, these all made sense because they all linked up.
Amanda Wallwork:They weren't isolated sites at all. And the same thing applies now, you know, to other prehistoric landscapes, the Stonehenge area, things, various everywhere. When you walk that landscape from the perspective of someone who might have walked it in prehistoric times, you're seeing it in a different way. You're looking at, what am I aiming for? And there's my oh, there's a standing stone on that hill.
Amanda Wallwork:That must be a marker or whatever that kind of thing. So you get a sense of it more. And these people were responding to what was there. So leading from this and these maps so these these maps are about bringing those things together in a way that you can then experience it and look at it, discover things for yourself. And if you want to know more, you can go and find out.
Amanda Wallwork:And this alongside all these maps and things like that I was doing, since the Sherborne House situation, I'd when that closed, I got together with some friends and and colleagues, actually, and artists, and we formed a new organization called B Side to work with the Isle Of Portland. And we didn't have a gallery space, so it was okay. We had to work with the landscape as the gallery or the or the place as the gallery. So I became a specialist in in commissioning artists to produce work in outdoor locations, responding to what was there, and there were difficulties of not having a building to you have you're free of all those constraints of having to finance a building. But
Speaker 3:last thing most, B side. Yeah.
Amanda Wallwork:B side is
Estelle Phillips:an absolutely fantastic festival. A groundbreaking festival, isn't it? And not last year, the year before, it had a huge write up in The Guardian. The festival is really embedded in the landscape, isn't it? And you really get
Speaker 3:a pretty strong sense of this intimate
Amanda Wallwork:relationship as a place.
Estelle Phillips:I didn't know that you were the person who was behind that.
Amanda Wallwork:Started it. Yeah.
Estelle Phillips:All makes sense.
Amanda Wallwork:Portland is one big quarry. Everyone lives with it in the little bits of left road, and that's left in between the quarries.
Estelle Phillips:It's literally like that.
Amanda Wallwork:It is. It's literally like a cross of rock. Yeah. Everywhere you go is you're you're driving through a quarry, and I when I lived in the Sherwin area, for thirty years, I believed what everyone told me was that Portland was a boring, bleak, dull place, and no one you don't wanna go there. And I believed it.
Amanda Wallwork:And then I went there, and I was completely blown away because it's not like that at all. It's an extraordinary place, absolutely extraordinary. It's been really fucking about with. It really has. It's got a lot of a lot of issues to deal with.
Amanda Wallwork:But as a place, it's like nowhere else in Dorset. The closest thing is probably Orkney in terms of what's what's landscaped like. It's barren. Trees I mean, there's more trees now than there ever have been. And the trees have come because the quarries have left big holes in the ground, and trees have colonized those.
Amanda Wallwork:And because they're more sheltered because it's not this Windstep Plateau, with Limestone Plateau. So those and they're all sycamore trees, but they're regenerating a land new landscapes are happening on Portland now because with nature's reclaimed sort of course, most of them now are built on now. So this isn't happening, but some of the old quarries have been have re naturally rewilded in a different way, which causes a challenge in a way if you're looking at ecology and and nature management because a lot of these are invasive species because they're colonised and they come from gardens and they come from places. And it's got that dilemma of, you know, is any nature better than no nature or is there some nature better than other nature and things like that. So there's all these challenges on how best do you look after it, and all those different things come up.
Amanda Wallwork:But it's a fascinating landscape. The festival explores it's both people and the place. So a lot of the project is about the people, working with people, but a lot of place and but also there's a lot of derelict infrastructure on Portland from the Cold War period, a lot of military experimentation on the island, and some of these the bunkers and all the big defensive fencing is still there. And so it can feel very kind of forbidding. But all this infrastructure is is this whole story that can be told, so it's quite a fascinating place.
Amanda Wallwork:So I recommend going deeper than just the drive to the Porton Bill. If you go to Portland, do a bit more exploring. Get out of the car and do a bit of exploring. It's really beautiful. Yeah.
Amanda Wallwork:The coast path if you do the coast path, you'll experience most of it in some way or whatever. Anyway, I'd recommend that. It can feel like a Mediterranean. When the sun's out, the the shining whiteness of the stone and the blue of the sea and the rocky landscape, you can feel like you're on Greece or something like that. So I became absolutely fascinated with that landscape.
Amanda Wallwork:But also working as a curator, I was actually supporting other artists to make work rather than my own, which has always been a dilemma for me is keeping that balance. Of it's been financial. I have to do some things because they and it's always been a sometimes I've heard more from the curation, sometimes more from selling work. But somehow, I've managed to get through to today managing to make a living from my art one way or another. Not a good living, I have to say, but I've managed it somehow.
Amanda Wallwork:It's always been my absolute passion. I I can't think about anything else, really. But I'm absolutely fascinated by the research into landscape and what it means. And the conclusion I've come from this and I've also been involved in other project, developing other projects, big project which we did with B side, which was heritage lottery funded called This Land, was really looking at the island and how it was formed and how to look after an an island was the focus of that project. And that's we're now looking at the aftermath of that project in terms of what that did.
Amanda Wallwork:But that was really focused on because the people of Portland said, we care about our landscape, our environment, but we don't feel we can do anything about it. We feel helpless. We don't know what we can do. It feels like everything's being done to us, and there's nothing we can do. So this is this is sort of a way of, okay, let's empower.
Amanda Wallwork:Let's empower people to do something, to feel they have got a voice. And that started with looking at understanding Batman to start with. So you're not looking at the top down, let's stop this. Let's say, let's look at how it's formed, how what it means, why it's important, and tell that story, and you're more likely to engage more people of across different backgrounds than you are by coming in a sort of, like, with a placard saying stop this or whatever. Both approaches work in different ways, but I was more interested in let's tell the story.
Amanda Wallwork:And artists are incredibly good at being able to tell stories. I mean, I mean, when I say artists, mean artists of any description, writers, photographers, filmmakers, anyone. Because you can use the visual and the written word to tell a story in a way that a textbook doesn't or, you know, various things go in the same way. Or or talking to a geologist can be quite challenging, because not all of them are very good communicators. And so my kind of thing is like, want to make that story more accessible in some way through my art rather than just telling people this is because this happened in this you know, but tons of things like that.
Amanda Wallwork:And this so this is there's so many strands that come together, and I'm always thinking of how can we do this, what can we do them, and what can I and and what do I do myself? And one of the things that have come to realization, the absolute realization, if you like, this is my conclusion from everything, is how important habitats are. So this is the and we are so and of course, collectively here, not any particular is that we are so concerned about our own habitat that we go about destroying creatures' habitats all the time without realizing it. Every time you sweep up leaves in a garden, you clear a path, you you pave over your front garden to for your car. All these things, every time they cut the verges and all this stuff, you're destroying something's home.
Amanda Wallwork:And I can't get that out of my head that, really, we don't really take enough notice of that. We don't really really think what we're doing. Every time we change something, every time we build a housing estate or we create another road or we cut the verges down because we want to take tame nature and make it perform in a certain way because we've got to contain it and not let let it do this and that and that. We're actually destroying habitats. This is what concerns me at the moment, that you're getting pockets of little bits of nature with no roots between them for creatures to travel between, and you're isolating that, and you're basically destroying it by containing it in a way you're not allowing it to actually sort of function as it should do.
Amanda Wallwork:And every time you interfere with it with insecticides or or fertilizers, you're changing that that environment. And that deeply concerns me. And I suppose my work now is how can we tell that story in a way that people will realize is for themselves, rather than just being told what to do or what not to do. And where the action needs to come, and I probably am going far too far with this now in terms of activism, but is the people is we're talking talking too much to the people that already know. We're not talking to people that don't know.
Amanda Wallwork:And it's finding that route to the people that don't know and need to know that is the significant thing. So that's a very long story. It's it's sort of like a but please, if there's any questions or anything you want to explore further in any of that
Speaker 4:What are you doing now in your art in order to send that message forward?
Amanda Wallwork:It's a good question because I'm constantly questioning myself about this. I'm although And my own work at the moment is sort of going through different things, different routes for trying to I'm always experimenting and trying different things. Painting is a constant, but I always try and a lot the stuff I'm doing at the moment is with using the rocks that I collect on my journeys and how I can use those different ways to tell stories. So that's where I am with my own work. Finding where that goes is a difficult thing.
Amanda Wallwork:How do I how does that get out there to people is the challenge for it?
Speaker 4:Well, if I tell my little bit, it's comes from working as an executive coach for the last sort of thirty years or so. I've worked with senior executives in all countries around the world. And I got together with the Climate Coaching Alliance, several people around the world decided to collaborate on a publication which we've produced called Shaping Tomorrow. And it's a way of talking to politicians, leaders, people who don't normally talk about nature, but also to get them to think about how we can change the system. Because unless we change the system, nothing's going to happen.
Speaker 4:And it's about coaching, it's about collaboration with those people, not telling them what to do with the notice like you said. But also, it's about helping them to come on side with you. But also learning to to challenge people and not to be afraid to challenge because I think that's what we do when we're with leaders or politicians. We don't challenge them enough around. So what impact will that have on the environment?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:So what would your children say about that? You know, I had a guy in in America who wanted promotion, and he came to me for coaching. And I I said to him, after I'd got to know him a bit, you know, what would your son think of your decision? And there was an absolute silence. And the and he then said to me, well, he wouldn't he wouldn't want me to do this.
Speaker 4:And I said, so you're going against what he would want, but because so I challenged him on his why. And after the few conversations, he decided he would not go the route that he was going to go because it would be polluting the atmosphere, and his son wouldn't approve, and his son's children wouldn't approve either. So looking down seven years of generations, what would they say about what you're doing? So it's about not only listening to people and collaborating with them, but it's also challenging them on a level that they perhaps haven't been challenged before. And so that's why this publication has become free for anyone to download, and it's to help people to talk to leaders about how we can change the system.
Speaker 4:If you go to the climatecoachingalliance.org stroke shaping tomorrow playbook. Those are great.
Amanda Wallwork:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's gone around several countries. So we we collaborated with Germany, Italy, Italy, Poland, India, Singapore, and Australia. So the people were from those countries that did the playbook together, and we wrote it together. And we all did an aspect of it. So it's it's also not only the leaders in our country, but the leaders around the world and how to approach them as well.
Amanda Wallwork:That sounds really useful because it is those conversations and that challenging is really quite
Speaker 4:I think because it's connection with what you do and what we did because I think also it needs to be shown to people in other ways, so visually as well. I mean, that's a book. We haven't illustrated it very much. We have, but not and and when you were talking, my mind was going, oh, that's nice collaboration possibly for the next issue.
Amanda Wallwork:Yeah. Yeah. It was one of the things that I it was the visual impact of something has, obviously, me, has quite a thing. When it it was when I saw a map of Portland with all the permissions for mineral extraction, I. E, where the quarries could be, because it was all after the war.
Amanda Wallwork:Basically, the whole of Portland was mapped out for quarry. All of it was read, apart from one tiny little bit. And I thought that's really shocking. But it it was the visual impact of seeing that map that make brought it home to me rather than reading it and being just being told it. And it it was very powerful.
Speaker 4:And and that's what we do with the executives. We take them out. When I go to London, for example, I don't know why I'm retired now, but when I was in London, we took them to Hyde Park. We took them to Green Park. We took them out by the River Thames, and we were walking together along into in the countryside side by side.
Speaker 4:And of course, they freed up to to talk to you. Whereas, sitting over a desk in an office, they weren't free to talk to you. So they would actually be much more expansive when you said and you use metaphors when you're outside. You know, I had this lady who went through a fountain in the concrete notes there. I told her there's a there's a fountain over there.
Speaker 4:And she used the fountain that which had various spouts as her team. And she started to talk about some of the spouts were coming up from the ground very high, some were lower. And she started to relate those to her team. And because it was less threatening, she was able to talk about it in a way she'd never heard before. So it's actually like you did.
Speaker 4:You noticed things in the in the landscape that you hadn't before. That's what they did when they were talking about other things. And it's very freeing.
Amanda Wallwork:Getting out there really makes a big difference.
Speaker 4:Makes you make such a difference. Yeah.
Amanda Wallwork:It's really important. I think it's really important for children in schools that they go out there and do it. And they just learn about it in the classroom. They're actually out there physically doing stuff and getting their hands dirty, touching the soil, and realizing what soil is. It's not just mud.
Amanda Wallwork:It's not just dirt. It's actually a living thing. And what it's made of is really quite important, but we don't we don't have enough of that.
Speaker 3:That's very nice what you've talked about. Very interesting. I'm particularly interested in rock faces and colors. So it's really story to that. I basically get excited about the shapes and the color, and you've it gives you lots of energy just to be there and look, look, look, and look.
Speaker 3:And as a response, I tried to translate that from sketches into whatever. It could be painting, it could be textile art. That keeps
Amanda Wallwork:me
Speaker 3:going. And I moved from Merseyside to Dorset because I come from a very flat country, Poland. And the hills are constantly a few, and I get excited every time. You know,
Estelle Phillips:you say you get excited every time you see a hill.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Can
Estelle Phillips:you ex expand on that feeling, please?
Speaker 3:Not really, but I was on hospital the other day by myself. There was almost nobody about, and it was just you're very connected to everything around you and still, and you don't need anything else. Just being there.
Amanda Wallwork:That's a
Speaker 3:And, obviously, I get excited about shapes and colors, but it's like a rhythm of an inner world. I don't know. But You
Estelle Phillips:say you don't know, but that answer was very beautiful.
Speaker 3:Well, you see all the lines that are connected. Probably goes deeper than that, but you need to feel it.
Amanda Wallwork:I'm talking to a geologist once. Because you can get a different when you go to different places, you can get different you get different feelings about that place. And you can respond. You can go somewhere you've never been before and think, I feel at home here. I relate to this in some way.
Amanda Wallwork:And I've also wondered about that. Then and he was talking about a sense of place, and he particularly used an example of that quite often, what this actually relates to is the stone. Is that what you're actually picking up on? Yeah. And that in the if you were born somewhere that was a limestone area
Speaker 3:The energy of the stone.
Amanda Wallwork:Exactly. And then you go somewhere else. And you can easily feel, I can relate to this. And this is what I was getting when I went to certain places. It was the stone that was making me think.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, I I artist lady many, many years ago, she would always talk about a stone and the energy each stone had. Some are good for you, some are bad for you. It radiates. So And you can look at
Amanda Wallwork:that in different ways. You can look at it purely on a physics level or a chemistry level or you can look it more spiritual level. But, basically, what it is based on is that feeling Yeah. What or how that impacts on you. And if you grew up, he this is the geologist who said that it there's there's two villages in Dorset.
Amanda Wallwork:One Abbots Bria and Porteshill, which are about a mile apart. One's limestone and one's Keralian stone. So one's a sort of reddish orange color and one's gray. Yeah. Yeah.
Amanda Wallwork:Very different. Yeah. But you it's only a mile between them. So that he said he was he didn't why does he feel he really connected with Portashy and his wife did as well? And then he sort of like, oh, it's because because I grew up in Southern Points.
Amanda Wallwork:It's the same light, same stone. You know? So he was like, it so this can take it's a really of I don't know. It's a very it's a feeling based thing, but it's also an an actual fact based thing. Yeah.
Amanda Wallwork:There's a reason a reason for all this, particularly. But the our affinity with this can be quite profound in some cases. As microbiology Yeah. If it's all.
Speaker 3:I looked into plankton and did quite a bit of design on it, how beautiful and fantastic shapes they are. So enlarged and they are filmed by photographers on the sea, and they show it up as very colored beautiful shapes. But all the doors at the white rocks are formed from that Yeah. From the chalk of the so, yeah, there's a history to each part of the countryside.
Amanda Wallwork:Yeah. It's I mean, in England, it it is particularly significant because, I mean, a lot of places, they are just the same geology throughout, and you don't get, I say, that amount of variety. Dorset, England and Dorset is huge geological variety because it's all come to surface. Okay. It might be deposited in you know, layers over time.
Amanda Wallwork:But because of land movements, you get that sort of shifting. You get different aged rocks that are at the surface. Mhmm. And these all then impact on the soil above, etcetera. But that's where you get these different shapes.
Amanda Wallwork:We why some areas are really hilly and some are flat and some are mountainous and that. Because these all have an impact on that. And it and it really forms that sense of place in that respect.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Looking into that from the plankton, which is threatened by everything Yeah. It gives us 45% oxygen more than plants, and
Speaker 5:it's unbelievable.
Amanda Wallwork:If you wanna yeah. When you start going into the science of it Yeah. You can really yeah.
Speaker 3:45% on the whole globe.
Amanda Wallwork:And things that I didn't realize that because so own grassland is as valuable in this country as rainforest in terms of its biodiversity and its and its carbon, you know, the other well, that related to the our our environment. So looking after that land in terms of grassland, I mean, I'm talking about I'm not talking about the kind of planted sort of grazing land, of the old grassland, which has evolved, if you like. So those areas of common land, which haven't been cultivated or anything used on them, are really important. Just having open areas of grassland can be just as important
Speaker 3:as forests in in in our Seagulls as well. And the sea yeah. Really. Seagrass. And that's another very minute world.
Speaker 3:The smallest seahorse was only discovered, I think, twenty, thirty years ago. You can't even see it. Yeah. It's really no. When you go into the details, all the microbiology is fantastic.
Speaker 4:And the seahorses are protected now in Scotland,
Speaker 3:aren't they? Because the birds in They've got the bones coming in. They destroy the seagulls. Yes. You know, the the the Irish protect them.
Estelle Phillips:You've written a whole collection about trees.
Speaker 5:Well, I didn't I didn't, like, set out to write, but I went in I actually went into a period of solitude in not in Guatemala, and I yeah. I was on a certain path and being more introspective and going inward. And I, as I say, I had this period of solitude, and for three months, I didn't say a soul or speak to anybody. And I wasn't expecting this at all, but I was able to connect deeply with everything around me. Not that there were words spoken, but it was like I got an intuitive sense from the bamboo trees in front of my cabin, the mountain, the volcano actually that was across the lake.
Speaker 5:Everything had a message, you know, not through words, but just this intuitive sense of things that were coming up in me that I was when you're silent, you start to recognise certain behaviours, emotions, thoughts. Things are very clear. And what was happening was that rather than a teacher, nature itself became my teacher and was able to intuitively guide me, I guess. Like one example, I remember not long into this period of solitude, remember watching this bamboo leaf just hanging with by a cobweb, and it was very much teaching me about the precarious situation of the ego and, you know, how I was how that was dissolving, and a greater sense of peace was emerging. So everything just started speaking to me in this in this three month period.
Speaker 5:And only really towards the end of that three month period, suddenly all this poetry started spewing through me, and I just I mean, not automatic writing, but it felt a bit like that. I was like, oh my goodness. Like and I just and I nearly filled a whole notebook of of poetry and, like, had no intention to write. That wasn't what I was doing that for. You know?
Speaker 5:So this all just came through. And then since then, that was in 2018, and then since then, well, periods back in Ireland, looking after family. And, yeah, just again, just those intuitive messages that I would that I would get from the ash trees, you know, in in the garden. And then I went to live on an island in the West Coast Of Scotland for four years and sort of lived a little bit like a hermit, I guess. And when you were talking there about the whole point of moving up there was to live off grid and to not disturb the land in any way.
Speaker 5:And when I left to like, I didn't put any concrete down. I put a small dwelling on the land that could be moved. Was a tiny home. And and learned how to build it as well. And everything was built of natural and local materials.
Speaker 5:And I the whole point of it was to, yeah, leave everything exactly as I found it and not to disturb the land and to to work with the land and to listen to the land and not just impose what I wanted, you know, but to, you know, really listen and work together. And so during that time, also because geology's, you know, we've got, I think, the oldest rocks in the world, you know, up on the island of Mullen, Iona. And, again, over those four years, just not as much poetry came through because I was also concentrating on building and working and but some poems came through, and I just self published this little booklet called The Trees Are My Teachers. But it's about what trees intuitively teach me, but it's also rocks, ocean, just everything the Great Mother has to offer, really. So What's your name
Speaker 4:so people can find it?
Speaker 5:Kelly Anne? Yes. I don't have a web site or anything.
Amanda Wallwork:I'm not and I'm not very I'm trying to get my head around a
Speaker 5:lot technology. Well, people could email me
Speaker 6:if they want to.
Amanda Wallwork:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And my email is solaceinselfOkay.@outlook.com.
Speaker 6:But yeah.
Speaker 5:Yep. You're okay. Thank you. I saw you nodding.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So, Leona and I are both staying on a nature recovery project in Sharpen near Tottenass in Devon. So, I went there on a traineeship after going on a retreat at Sharpen, just a week long nature retreat and having that connection, that sort of epiphany thing. I was a postman before that and I just thought, well, it's time for me to do something different. And, yeah, it's just a beautiful place to be.
Speaker 7:And there's an ecologist that lives on-site who I think you guys should chat to. It'd be cool.
Speaker 3:Can you
Speaker 7:Everything
Estelle Phillips:say a little bit about the epiphany, please?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Just being silent in nature, I think. And the landscape there, looking down on the River Dart was just this you know, they used to use that landscape for films in in the sort of fifties and sixties and pretend it was the Amazon. It's so lush down there. And just being embraced by the land sort of yeah.
Speaker 7:It just had a massive impact on me and I thought, oh, maybe I can do something worthwhile. And yeah. So I met the owner there as well.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Same. So I I moved to this special place and feel very lucky to spend time there. I work in the garden there, so I grow food. And and I think connecting with the land.
Speaker 6:I also think connecting with food is really important and where food comes from and how that shapes the land. I've developed some sessions around trying to connect people with food in this garden, which is amazing because it overlooks the valley that Chris was just talking about, that river, really special landscape. And it's got rewilding happening within it, so you can kind of look out and see nature recovery happening. Yeah. It's very special.
Estelle Phillips:I'm sure we all want to know what food you grow. It's such a basic question.
Amanda Wallwork:Yeah.
Speaker 6:It's a one acre market garden, organic vegetables. So it's not commercial or anything. We have residential nature recovery trainees come to live with us for three or four months at a time. And so it's mostly like an educational and a therapeutic garden. So the trainees will come up and we work with lots of different people as well.
Speaker 6:We've got a charity who works with adults with additional needs and they have garden groups who come up. And so it's a space where we all grow together, and it's a very, like, mindful space as well. We do look there's lots of meditation that's happening up there, and and then we grow the food that we then eat on-site because we live communally. What's it called? Ambios on The Sharpen Estate.
Speaker 6:How do you spell that? A M B I 0 S.
Estelle Phillips:And which estate is it on?
Speaker 6:The Sharpen Estate. Yeah. It's so fascinating. I loved hearing about this and the geology and how that kind of shapes the land is fascinating. And I've never really thought about it or made that connection.
Speaker 6:I'm just interested in, cause in a lot of our sciences, we kind of and a lot of our modern world, we kind of separate things. So, you know, you've geology and botany and all this. And it sounds like more holistic, your projects. What's your experience been trying to kind of piece together some of those different things that are often very separate departments.
Amanda Wallwork:That's exactly what yeah. That's what exactly what experience is. It's real you know, knowing these all things are separate, and they're separate sciences or they're separate disciplines. But when you actually put it together from the experience of yourself experiencing it, this is really important. Then it all comes and it all makes sense.
Amanda Wallwork:This is the thing that I love is the way that all kind of interconnects and makes sense. And once you realize that, then you then if you can if you can apply that to everything else, you can understand why you do certain things in a garden or or with growing stuff and that and, you know, all these things. And I think that's really important, the growing thing. One of the things, if you like, one of the things I'm most proud of at the moment is that all this work that I'm doing in different ways. I used to think the best thing I'd ever done was the children's book back in 1994 or whatever, you know.
Amanda Wallwork:I've never do anything else. At least I've had a book published. But actually, what it is now is is motivating and we're actually on Portland. We're trying to buy a small bit of Bandon Quarry, which has got some allotments on it to save those allotments from development. Soil is very thin on Portland, growing stuff is quite difficult.
Amanda Wallwork:So any bit of land that you can grow stuff on is really important. So we're actually launching Campaign to try and buy this bit of land at the moment. And so where my energies are going is my own work is one thing, but where my energies are going on is motivating and trying to make this happen, to actually do something. So even buy a small bit of land so you can do that with, to save it from because everything's now under pressure from various developments. So that's where I feel that I'm most of most of my energies are really going into the let's try and make this happen.
Amanda Wallwork:Let's really make this we don't have to accept all this stuff just happening, but you it's a hard work because you've really got to you've got all the challenges. It's not just the people you have to convince. It's all the layers of bureaucracy you have to get through. Raising money at the moment is really challenging anyway. You know, no one's got anything spare.
Amanda Wallwork:Well, there are plenty of people who spare, but choosing not to spend it on it. But how do you do that? How do you get people to actually change the way they've been doing things and actually realize that this is so important, that growing and those that access to nature. Without it, we're completely lost, and it's just so important. And you can't just recreate it just like that.
Amanda Wallwork:It's something that is fundamental, and it takes thousands of years to form.
Speaker 3:Thank you very much. I'm giving you guys a clap.
Estelle Phillips:Subscribe to Nature Talks With Humans for more true stories of people communicating with animals, birds, and landscape. Follow me on Instagram at Estelle underscore writer forty four, and TikTok at Estelle Phillips. Bye.