Seeking relief
On weekends and even late at night, I discovered people — young and old, mothers and daughters, friends and lovers — hugging trees or resting their backs against a trunk while seeking relief from everyday stresses.
These stresses have compounded, especially after the COVID pandemic when loneliness and isolation became commonplace. Moreover, as many , they seek and .
Trees, , make young people feel “rooted” and “alive”. In my interviews with more than 25 young women and men as part of my ongoing research — which is yet to be published — I discovered that more women than men went to forest therapy, seeking both friendship with trees and other human beings.
In these therapies, Wong adapted the traditional forest bathing therapies with her own ideas to enhance people’s engagement. These include “plant enactment” where people could take on the name of their favourite tree and be called by this name all day. She encouraged us, the participants in the therapy, to share a gesture that we associated with our chosen plant, one that described how we imagined the tree would move.
Wong was joined in these sessions by other women who too had given up the pursuit of high-pressure jobs and had instead taken this part-time work to look after people, trees and plants in the city.
