Author Ilka Tampke shares how daily forest walks have transformed her writing process, boosting creativity and cognitive function. She describes parking her car near the trail head, leashing her labrador, and breathing in the cold, peppery air as she begins her walk through the eucalypt forests of central Victoria.
The Forest as a Source of Ideas
Tampke notes that walking in the forest daily is like catching up on ecological news. She observes fallen trees, blooming flowers, animal activity, and incoming weather. Surrounded by non-human life, she learns that she is not the main form of life on the planet but one note in a vibrant choir of living beings. This lesson is absorbed not just intellectually but with her heart, lungs, muscles, and skin.
When asked where writers get their ideas, common answers include books, film, music, art, and people. Tampke, however, believes her ideas come from trees. During the early months of writing her last novel, she noticed that walking in forests made her mind work differently: ideas came quickly, thoughts roamed freely, and narrative gaps were solved by the end of the walk. This effect was so pronounced that she committed to a year of daily walking, which changed how she wrote forever.
Scientific Evidence for Forest Benefits
Research shows that being in forests lowers blood pressure, improves metabolic function, enhances immunity, reduces anxiety and loneliness, and boosts mood. Across almost every physiological and psychological measure, human function improves when spending time among trees. But do forests specifically boost creativity?
Researchers measure creativity by testing associative thinking. A study measuring associative performance before and after forest therapy found significant increases. Qualitative studies also show that natural environments enhance creative thinking by increasing curiosity, ideas, and flexible thinking. While it seems obvious that walking in pleasant settings is conducive to creativity, researchers do not have a definitive explanation. Psychologists suggest cognitive rest in soothing forest environments refreshes the brain for creative thinking, but Tampke believes it is more than that.
Understanding Trees as Sentient Beings
Contemporary science is beginning to understand what many Indigenous cultures have always known: plants are highly perceptive and responsive creatures that converse with their environment and each other, living full and complex lives. Trees do not have words but express themselves through colour, scent, growth, and a chemical lexicon beyond human perception. Every bend in their branches and new shoot is a decision about light, water, kin, and predators. Their bodies are their thoughts; their patterns are their intelligence.
Plants are the dominant life form on Earth, continuously proliferating, branching, blossoming, dying, and feeding new growth. The forest is, in every sense, a place of creativity. The novel Tampke wrote during her year in the forest was different from anything she had written before: fragmented, connected by the rhizomatic logic of memory and association. It was forest-like. She wonders whether the novel came from her head or if it is just one instance of a human humming along with the fundamentally generative nature of the living Earth.
Ilka Tampke is the author of How to Love the World, out now (Summit Books).
