Green social prescribing aims to connect people to nature-based activities that matters to them and support them in taking ‘greater control of their health’. Whilst numerous studies demonstrate the short-term benefits of engaging with nature-based activities, the longevity of these effects on a person’s wellbeing are still to be established. As well as if attending nature-based activities influence peoples’ long-term actions and practices to support their wellbeing.

My PhD focuses on peoples’ encounters with nature-based activities and the influence of these on their wellbeing over time. My methods combined interviews and creative activities to develop a detailed life history account of peoples’ experiences of nature-based activities and their wellbeing. Drawing on a range of examples from the co-produced data, I will discuss how nature-based activities can provide individualised transformative experiences. I will focus on participants’ shifts in how they relate to their self and developed affective practices and spaces, which informs a personalised way of being for the long-term maintenance and enhancement of their wellbeing. I will then consider the role of participants’ long-term nature-based wellbeing practices when they negotiate disruptions, which have the potential to diminish their wellbeing.

I will finish by considering the implications for social prescribing policy, focusing on the calls for evaluating the efficiency and cost effectiveness of social prescribing by using a series of standardised metrics and measures. The use of standardised evaluations can miss the nuances of people’s experiences. As such there can be a tension between how programmes are experienced and how they are evaluated. Research conducted through the lens of ‘therapeutic landscapes’ has the potential to disrupt these reductionist approaches to evaluation and do justice to participants experiences of social prescribing by recognising the contextual complexities of therapeutic experiences of nature-based activities.