I remember going for a walk with my mother in some woodland west of London, probably when I was in my late teens. I don’t remember what we were talking about but suddenly I realised that the biggest questions about biology would not be answered through experimental studies, but through analysing the observations of the naked eye, through just looking at living objects like these tree, that the secret was hiding in plain sight.
Much later I learnt about fractals, about life evolving at the edge of chaos, about complexity – how the linear science we have exploited so successfully in technology has so little to offer when we look at the natural world.