The Story Behind Nature's Whispers

There are books that begin with research.

Nature's Whispers began with gummy boots.

Both my grandparents had villas outside the city, and from the time I was little, those were the places where I learned what the world was actually made of. Not the city world of pavements and noise and hurry, but the other world — the one that moved at the pace of weather, of seasons, of things growing slowly in soil.

My mother's father was my first teacher. He would take me out in our gummy boots and raincoats, not waiting for the rain to stop, but going out because of it. He taught me to listen to rain the way other people listen to music — to hear the difference between rain on leaves and rain on stone, on water, on the roof of the red shed. We climbed peaks together, more than I can count.

One year, he gave me a small piece of the garden and told me to plant whatever I wanted and tend it myself. That little plot of earth taught me more than I knew at the time — about patience, about failure, about the quiet satisfaction of watching something you planted push its first green shoot above the soil.

My mother's mother taught me about flowers. She knew their names the way some people know old friends — by sight, by habit, by what time of year they appeared. Every morning at the villa, before anything else, I would run outside to see what had opened overnight, what had changed, what the garden had done while I was sleeping.

There was an oak tree in the meadow that I loved more than any place I knew. Old and thick-canopied, it threw shade wide enough to sit in for hours. I brought books there. I brought nothing there. I sat under it and let the afternoon move around me in the particular slow way that afternoons move when you are young and the world feels enormous and unhurried.

My mother, a former ski instructor and mountain guide, taught me to move through nature. My father, a former national team football player and a great diver, taught me to fish. He would wake me at three in the morning, which felt like the middle of the night, and we would go out together into the dark. He taught me three things on those early mornings that I have never forgotten: to be quiet, to be patient and to observe. Not to fill the silence, not to rush toward the next thing, but to wait — to let the world come to you when it was ready.

Besides having a ton of pets, our family loved active holidays. From walking the dog to hiking and trekking, caves, cycling, sailing, ski, swimming in seas and oceans and rivers. Nature was never something we visited on weekends. It was where we lived when we could.

My father's father was a chef. He took me to collect herbs, mushrooms and blueberries in the forest. My father's mother taught me to make herbaria — to press and preserve the plants we found, to learn their Latin names, to understand that a flower is not just beautiful but biological, specific, irreplaceable. That education in looking closely, in naming carefully, in understanding that every living thing has a story, led somewhere I did not expect.

When I was twelve, I won a competition and I joined the only children's team in the country attached to a team of national biology science experts. We were taught by scientists — about ecosystems, about species, about the intricate, patient logic of the living world. I was twelve years old, sitting with experts, learning to see what most people walk past without noticing.

That is where Nature's Whispers came from.

Not from a decision to write about nature, but from a childhood spent inside it — guided by people who loved it and knew how to share that love without making it a lesson.

The narrow path in the grass behind the villa. The snail crossing from one leaf to another while I crouched in yesterday's jumper. The blackbird holding its weight against the morning on a fence post. The dandelion clock breaking open beside the school fence. The leaf turning once through green air before it falls.

These poems are acts of noticing. And I learned to notice from people who woke me at three in the morning, handed me a trowel, pointed at a foxglove, and said — look.

This book is for them.

Want to read selected poems from Nature's Whispers?

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