Writer, herbalist and wilderness guide Brigit Anna McNeill joins us in conversation to discuss her book The Wild Within, an immersive journey of healing, recovery and rewilding, one wild plant at a time. Blending folklore, ecology and personal story, McNeill explores how the cycles of growth and bloom found in common wild flowers and trees can guide us back to ourselves, illuminating a botanical path of self-care.

Brigit will be joined by author Francis Tophill

Followed by audience Q&A and book signing.

Writer, wilderness guide and plant teacher Brigit Anna McNeill joins us to speak about her forthcoming book The Wild Within.
Through story, science and the wisdom of plants, Brigit explores recovery from trauma, the intelligence of the body, and the ways the natural world can guide us back to belonging. Drawing on years of working with people in wild landscapes, she shares the profound lessons plants and wildness offer about resilience, restoration and remembering our place in the living world. This evening will be a conversation about healing, wildness, nature and the quiet ways the earth calls us back to ourselves.
Brigit Anna McNeill is a writer, wilderness guide and plant teacher whose work explores the relationship between human healing and the living world. Through story, ecology and plant wisdom, she invites people to reconnect with the intelligence of the body and the wild landscapes within and around us. Her book The Wild Within explores trauma, recovery and the deep remembering that can occur when we listen to the more-than-human world.
Brigit will share readings from her forthcoming book alongside stories of plants, wild places and the quiet intelligence of the earth.

Quotes from The Wild Within:
“The earth believes in her seeds, whether they lie hidden in soil or in the soft chambers of our ribcages.”
“Like the earth, I am still unfurling, drawn upward by a light I may never fully name, but which I trust with my whole, green self.”
“The forest does not measure which root or heartbeat is most deserving. It tends all without hesitation, as though the flourishing of one were impossible without the flourishing of all.”
The women who carried seeds in their clothing understood that to garden is an act of resistance. Each plant that sprouted in new soil was a refusal to be erased, a declaration that even when people are uprooted, they can still put down roots.”
“We hold seeds within us that have never seen light yet know their medicine. In the chambers of our hearts, dormant possibilities wait like ancient grains discovered in forgotten tombs- viable, patient, ready to sprout when we finally provide the conditions they require.”
“Uncovering the stories held in the wild, whether in feather, leaf or paw, creates in me a wonder that never grows old. Each story is a doorway back into awe, a reminder of how many ways there are to fall in love with the world.”
“If birds are singing at first light, then the world is, for now, still whole. And in that wholeness, we are safe.”
“The acoustic waves of thrush and robin songs brush over leaf and stem, reaching the tiny mouths through which plants breathe.”
“One being holds another, forming an infinite tapestry, an entangled mass of roots tied and stitched to each other. Pull out a single thread, and a multitude of others will unravel alongside it.”
“The land doesn’t always teach through idea, but always through encounter. And the psyche, long exiled from the body, begins to remember how to listen.”
“And because of that, because we are wild in origin and design, we carry within us a compass. A pull toward the world we are meant for. Not the one built from extraction and disconnection, but the one our cells still ache toward: a world of reciprocity, of balance, of enough.”
“We are still wild enough to remember.”
“The wild is not gone. It is simply waiting—beneath the surface of things, within us, around us, always ready to return when given the chance.”
“This is what we are: Earth in a temporary constellation, a brief arrangement of wildness learning how to love itself back to life.”
“What the land was doing, I was doing too: letting the machinery rest, letting the silence work its way in, letting small green shoots take hold in places I thought were beyond saving.”
“Healing does not mean mending every crack. It means growing wildflowers in the breaks.”
“There is a wildness in you that no trauma could extinguish—a seed that remembers the forest even in drought.”
“Return to the wild language of plants who never apologise for blooming.”
“Once the grip of control loosens, life rushes back in.”
There are no human atoms. Only nature’s atoms rearranged for a time into the brief shape of a woman, a fox, a poet, a dandelion.”
“If wildness can rise through poisoned fields, perhaps I can rise again from what was broken in me.”
“Salvation does not arrive on a white horse.
It comes on claw and wing, on mycelial thread and river current.
It comes from the soil-stained and the composting, from a chorus of beings - the furred and the rooted, the winged and the two-legged, the soft-bodied and the spore -filled – each one following the wild will that breathes within them.”
“The forest speaks in verbs older than words. The plants speak in sensations. When we begin to listen, the stories that rise are not just of earth - but of our own becoming.”



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