A note from Tamara:

‘I spent the first 30 years of my life living in cities, but always felt ill-at-ease in the clamour of urban environments. Even as a child, I used to feel a longing for home - somewhere peaceful. As a teenager and adult I tried lots of ways to escape my disquiet - drink, drugs, parties, lots of travel, but I always came back to the same feeling of being lost.

When I was almost 30 I worked on a film about hunter-gatherers - Tawai - A Voice from the Forest. As I watched the footage of hunter-gatherer tribes in Brazil, the Congo and Borneo, I was struck by the way they lived in close relationship with one another, and with the forests that were their homes. They found their food, their clothing and their shelter from the land around them, and in return they took care of it and honoured it. I realised that I did not know anything about the land I’d grown up in. I couldn’t name the trees or recognise the plants. I didn’t know what was poison and what was medicine. So I decided to learn.

The learning continues to this day. Studying foraging and tracking has taken me deep into the worlds of plants and animals, immeasurably enriching the human world I return to. The many wonders I found not only satisfied my intellectual curiosity about how we can live in right relationship with the earth, but also helped to soothe my soul’s longing to find a home in the world. As I learned about the trees, plants, rivers and animals, I learned that we are born into a world that, while challenging and sometimes frightening, is also full of medicine, gentleness and beauty.

I started Plant Listening because I believe that all people should have access to our real home - the natural world. Without it we humans get lost and look for nourishment in the wrong places. With the support of nature’s abundant medicine we are given vitality, and with the examples of the animals we learn to move through our lives with courage and dignity.

Learning to walk in this way, moving slowly, looking carefully, allows us to recalibrate the senses and notice all the subtle signs we otherwise miss. Both we and the world come back to life. ‘