How Nature Finds a Home Within Us

Benno Otter has spent half his life tending the park and gardens around the Goetheanum. Now he gives courses in nature appreciation. Wolfgang Held sat down with him for a conversation about how he brings nature closer to people.

---

Wolfgang Held: Do you remember one of your first experiences in nature?

Benno Otter: I grew up in northern Holland. I recall looking at the carnations we grew in our garden when I was six or seven years old and thinking they were beautiful. My second experience came during my school days. We had a wonderful biology teacher who gave us the task of creating a herbarium. So, I rode around on my bike and got to know nature properly for the first time. We had to collect a hundred different plants.

A hundred? And you learned all their names?

Yes, we had to dry the plants and identify them in the traditional way, with an identification book. It wasn’t a Waldorf school, but later, when I met my teacher again in high school, it turned out that he was an anthroposophist. He eventually introduced me to anthroposophy, and that’s how I ended up doing a biodynamic training in the Netherlands.

Do you have a favorite plant?

Goethe’s archetypal plant!

Let me ask you the other way around: is there a plant that you don’t find easy to relate to?

The sycamore tree. It just doesn’t seem very natural to me. But what is fascinating about the sycamore is that when its leaves fall in autumn, the new bud is located under the old leaf, and that’s where the new shoot appears. That’s what makes this tree magnificent again.

You can look back on decades of encounters with nature. What is important in an encounter?

Observation, inner calm, and patience. And following the plants through the course of the year again and again, again and again. It’s wonderful that a snowdrop appears in February, followed by crocuses and then foxgloves. So, finding inner peace while observing the plants closely and following the Goethean approach to contemplation. This means to begin with, looking-perceiving everything there is to perceive in a plant, then describing the entire plant, and allowing this observation to sink in.

This text is an excerpt from an article published in the (online exclusive) Goetheanum Weekly. You can read the full article on the website. If you are not yet a subscriber, you can get to know the Goetheanum Weekly for 1 CHF./€.

---

---