How Forest Bathing Healed My Heart

Losing her son shattered Kerry Parnell’s life. But the embrace of trees and green spaces slowly helped her to rediscover joy…

I remember looking at the leaves in the trees outside the hospital window, the day my son died.

Of all the memories of a day no parent should ever experience, I can still see the bottle-green leaves of those eucalyptus trees being gently buffeted by the breeze. Teddy’s room was high up in the children’s hospital in Melbourne, Australia. It was the middle of summer and the heat was oppressive that day, or maybe that’s just how it felt to me. The hospital was on the edge of a park and surrounded by trees – the architects had designed the glass exteriors to reflect the colours of the foliage, to create a “healing environment” for the patients.

In the end, it couldn’t heal the broken heart of my baby boy, but those trees planted a seed that, years later, would begin to mend mine.