Episode 01: How Therapeutic Landscapes Began

When Dr John Cussans and Desdemona McCannon started talking about the ideas that would eventually become Therapeutic Landscapes, they were two colleagues at the University of Worcester who kept arriving at the same questions from different directions, and finding that those questions had nowhere obvious to go.

John came through the lens of fine art and psychology, watching students discover that the landscapes artists have painted throughout history weren't chosen for their beauty alone. Constable painting Stonehenge. Monet returning to his gardens. Turner at Rievaulx Abbey. These places were already charged with something, something spiritual, healing, hard to name.

Desdemona came through the lens of illustration and folk culture, with a longstanding interest in the art made by people who perhaps wouldn't call themselves artists, and a growing awareness that folk practice was quietly re-entering the cultural conversation. Wassailing. Seasonal customs. The kind of rituals that had once seemed like heritage curiosities were now appearing in the Guardian and drawing in people who'd grown up in cities.

Between them, they noticed something else too: that a strand of research at Worcester was quietly coalescing around folklore, well-being and the more-than-human world. Different disciplines, different approaches, but still circling the same territory. A scoping review on therapeutic landscapes in human geography gave them a framework. And an earlier symposium, Enchanted Environments, had already shown there was interest for exactly this kind of conversation.

So they put out a call for papers. And the response was bigger than either of them expected.

That's the starting point for this first episode of the Therapeutic Landscapes podcast, a conversation with the two people who built it, tracing the path from those early overlapping interests to the moment they realised they weren't the only ones asking these questions. It's a conversation about landscape and imagination, about folk culture and public health, about the embodied experience of making things in a world that increasingly asks us to do everything on a screen.

And it's the beginning of a much longer story.