The Prepared Environment

What A Gold Medal Taught Me About The Environment That Matters Most

In 2021, the RHS Chelsea Flower Show awarded a Gold Medal to an exhibit that stopped visitors in their tracks.

It was not a garden in the traditional sense. It was a classroom. Or rather, a vision of what a classroom could be: plants alive with oxygen-giving intelligence, a full woodland mural flooding one wall with birch trees and bluebells, natural light falling across clean desks, the quiet hum of a space designed not just for learning but for flourishing.

It had taken two years to get there. From an early conversation with Clare Bowman, architect, sustainability advisor and the visionary behind the whole project, when she first shared with me the dream of bringing The Biophilic Classroom study to Chelsea, to the moment we actually stood there, alive, gold medal and all. Clare’s company, RCZM, had led the work from the beginning, and it was a privilege to come alongside her as a strategic consultant and help make that dream a reality.

And when I look at photographs of that stand, my first thought is always the same. I wish that had been my classroom. And not just mine - every young person.

Because what Clare and her team had built was not an installation. It was a proof of concept. A living demonstration of something the science had already confirmed and that many of us had quietly known for years: that the environment a young person learns in shapes not just their comfort but their cognition, their emotional capacity, their ability to be curious, engaged, and genuinely themselves.

That project, and everything it taught me, is where this piece begins.

What the Biophilic Classroom Proved

The Biophilic Classroom study was a nine-month research project commissioned by Putney High School (GDST), led by Clare Bowman, and published in 2019. It examined the measurable impact of introducing biophilic design in three sixth-form classrooms: one with plants, one with a large-scale woodland photographic mural, and one left unchanged as a control.

Biophilia, from the Greek for “love of living systems”, describes the innate human connection to nature. Biophilic design is the practice of bringing that connection into the built environment through direct nature (plants, water, natural light), natural analogues (imagery, texture, pattern), and the nature of the space itself (prospect, refuge, openness).

The results of Clare’s study were striking.

Indoor air quality improved by an average of 58% when plants and optimised ventilation were combined. Air quality outside, buffered by the school’s 15-metre mature landscape, was already 23% cleaner than the adjacent road. Children learn 20 to 25% faster when natural light is present. Over 78% of students reported feeling healthier. Over 65% said they felt more content. One student, who had taken on the task of caring for the plants, described the room simply: “With plants, it’s so relaxing now.”

The teacher, standing before her students with a forest of bluebells behind her, said something equally simple and equally profound: “I love teaching in this room.”

The Leuven-scale behavioural observations told the same story in the data. Students in the biophilic classrooms were operating at the highest levels of emotional involvement and cognitive engagement. Focused, absorbed, motivated. In the English classroom with the woodland mural, students physically moved their chairs to sit closer to it. The environment was not the background. It was active.

Professor Derek Clements-Croome of the University of Reading, whose Flourish Model underpins much of this work, frames it this way: “Our existence is enlivened every waking moment by a symphony of stimuli from people, objects, building spaces, task interest and nature. This rich array of inputs to the mind and body generates the multi-sensory experience which can colour and enrich the environment for people to flourish in.”

This is not an aesthetic preference. This is biology.

We Have More Than Five Senses

To understand why the environment shapes us so profoundly, it helps to understand how we actually experience the world.

Most of us were taught that we have five senses. And I loved discovering, through the work of leading neuroscientist and MIT Senior Adviser Dr Tara Swart in her recent book The Signs, that we have at least 34. Humans possess at least 34 distinct senses! Beyond sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch, we sense balance, internal bodily states, temperature, pain, time, spatial awareness, and the chemical composition of the air we breathe. Many of these senses operate non-consciously, forming a constant, layered intelligence that connects brain, body, and environment at a speed far beyond conscious reasoning.

What this means for learning environments is significant. When a young person walks into a room containing living plants, filtered natural light, a view of trees, and clean air, they are not simply seeing something pleasant. They are registering safety, calm, and connectedness across dozens of channels simultaneously. The nervous system responds. Alpha brain waves increase. Stress hormones reduce. Attention becomes available. The conditions for genuine learning open.

Equally, when a young person sits for hours under artificial lighting, breathing recycled air, and receiving a relentless stream of digital stimulation with no natural anchor, their sensory system registers something very different. Not dangerous, necessarily. But a kind of flatness. A disconnection from the very environment that their biology evolved alongside.

The Biophilic Classroom data is unsurprising when viewed through this lens. It is inevitable.

Montessori Understood This a Century Ago

Maria Montessori was working with this understanding long before neuroscience existed to explain it.

Her concept of the prepared environment was not about furniture arrangement or tidy shelves (I have genuinely been asked whether Montessori is “one of those schools where the children just run wild” - it is not, though the children do move, which is entirely the point). It was a philosophy of human flourishing built on six interconnected principles: Freedom. Structure and Order. Beauty. Nature and Reality. The Social Environment. The Intellectual Environment.

Each principle was deliberate. Each one served the child’s natural development rather than working against it.

Montessori wrote: “The environment must be rich in motives which lend interest to activity and invite the child to conduct his own experiences.”

This is biophilic design in educational form, before the vocabulary existed to name it. The prepared environment was multi-sensory by design. It included natural materials, plants, outdoor space, and beauty. It moved at the child's pace, not the curriculum's. It is believed that when the conditions were right, learning would happen not because it was forced but because curiosity is innate.

I hold a Diploma in Montessori Pedagogy, and what I experienced during my years in Montessori education has never left me. The most powerful classroom I ever taught in was not a room at all. It was outside. The outdoor environment brought together everything the prepared environment philosophy emphasises: freedom of movement, sensory richness, connection to nature’s rhythms, genuine curiosity, social collaboration, and the kind of absorbed, self-directed engagement that no worksheet ever reliably produces.

Children in those environments were not being managed. They were unfolding.

Montessori also understood something else that neuroscience is only now confirming. She wrote: “The child has a different relation to his environment from ours. Adults are detached from their environment. Children are absorbed by it.”

This is not a metaphor. It is a developmental fact.

Children Arrive With Intelligence, We Are Gradually Suppressing

Piaget identified ages four to seven as the intuitive substage of development: the period in which children base their understanding on felt sense and direct sensory experience rather than logical reasoning. They are not pre-logical. They are differently intelligent. Operating through an integrated, embodied form of knowing that is, in many ways, more sophisticated than the analytical thinking we spend the next decade training them to prioritise.

Jung described the child’s psyche as living closer to the unconscious, less filtered by social conditioning, more attuned to atmosphere, energy, and the subtle signals of the world around them.

Contemporary neuroscience supports both. Children are extraordinarily sensitive to micro-expressions, emotional atmospheres, environmental shifts and the non-verbal world. They perceive through their senses with a fluency that most adults have partly lost. Dr Tara Swart’s work on intuition as biological intelligence points directly to this: what we call intuition is not mystical. It is the body’s data system, a constant, subtle flow of information that helps us navigate complexity faster than conscious reasoning ever could.

Children have this in abundance. The question for me is what we do with it?

In a prepared environment, whether Montessori, biophilic or any space designed with genuine attention to the child’s natural development, that intelligence is honoured. The child is absorbed by their environment in the most positive sense. Their senses are engaged. Their curiosity is activated. Their nervous system is settled enough for all that native intelligence to do its work.

In a dysregulating environment, something different happens. The intuitive, sensory self goes quiet. Not because it disappears, but because it cannot operate well amid chronic noise, artificial stimulation, and disconnection from nature. It retreats. And the longer it retreats, the harder it becomes to reconnect with it later in life.

This is one of the patterns I see most consistently in young people today: a disconnection from their own inner signals. Not broken. Not ill. Simply unused to being asked what they actually feel, sense, and know.

The World We Have Built Instead

While we have been gathering evidence on which environments help young people flourish, we have simultaneously been building something quite different.

Jonathan Haidt’s research in The Anxious Generation documents what happened to adolescent mental health from the early 2010s onwards: rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm more than doubled across many countries in less than a decade. The WHO now ranks depression and anxiety among the top five causes of disability in adolescents globally. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among those aged 15 to 19.

These are not abstract statistics. They represent real young people navigating real lives.

And the context matters. The Biophilic Classroom study noted that people now spend up to 93% of their time indoors and an estimated eleven hours a day using technology. A generation of young people is growing up largely disconnected from the natural world, flooded with artificial stimulation, and living much of their social and emotional life through a screen. Their nervous systems are receiving information through dozens of channels simultaneously, yet most of that information pulls away from nature, presence, and embodied experience rather than towards it.

We ask young people to focus, learn, perform, and connect while providing many of the conditions that are most likely to undermine each of these.

The smartphone-free childhood conversation is important and necessary. But removing something is not the same as building something. The external environment matters enormously. And so does something we talk about far less: what is being built within.

The Pivot Inward

My career has moved through several worlds, including built-environment consultancy, team and culture leadership, creating businesses from the ground up with human connection at their centre, Montessori education, and sustainability strategy. And now, transformation education with young people and families.

These are not separate chapters. They are one continuing inquiry.

What I discovered while working in the world of built environments is that the best architects understand something profound: a building is not just shelter. It is a shaping force. The spaces we inhabit influence how we think, feel, connect, and perform. Winston Churchill captured this with characteristic precision: “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.”

Clare Bowman’s work at Putney High School demonstrated this at the classroom level. That data confirmed something I had already begun to sense from the inside: the external environment actively enables development. And at its best, as biophilic design and connection to nature show so powerfully, it supports the development of our inner world too.

But here is what I have also come to understand: neither dimension is exclusive to the other. A young person can sit in the most beautifully designed biophilic classroom and still be running on internal patterns that quietly limit what they can access from it. Not because the environment has failed. But because the internal landscape matters too. The outer and the inner are in constant conversation. Both shape what is possible. Both deserve our full attention.

But there came a point in my own inquiry where I found myself asking a different question. What about the environment we cannot see? The one we carry with us wherever we go?

Developmental science tells us that before the age of approximately seven, children have no critical faculty to accept or reject what they absorb. Their environment, their relationships, the emotional atmosphere of their early years, all of it is taken in wholesale. It becomes the blueprint. The invisible architecture of how they experience themselves and the world.

After seven, the conscious mind begins to come online. But those early patterns are already running. Filtering every new experience. Shaping what feels possible and what does not. These are what Poppy Delbridge, founder of the 7D framework of Pivot Into Power® and author of Unlock Your Power, calls Invisible Mind Patterns, or IMPs - a concept at the heart of her framework in which I am a Certified Facilitator. Learned responses, deeply embedded, that were once protected and are now quietly limited. They are not who a young person is. They are simply what they learned. And they can be rewritten.

This is where my work lives. In the formative years, when those patterns are still forming. In the window before they become compounded and calcified. Helping young people become, as I think of it, the architect, the designer, and the housekeeper of their own internal world.

This is Inner Architecture™.

Both. Together.

The prepared environment, in the fullest sense, has two dimensions.

The outer: the physical space, the quality of air and light, the presence of nature, the design of the learning environment. This is the world of biophilic design, Montessori pedagogy, and the brilliant work of people like Clare Bowman. It matters deeply. It should be protected, invested in, and given the serious attention the evidence demands.

The inner: the nervous system, the belief landscape, the emotional capacity, the patterns of thought that shape how a young person interprets and responds to everything around them. This is the world of Inner Architecture™. It is the internal prepared environment. And yet it is the dimension of learning environments that education has, until recently, given the least structured attention to. It is my mission to shift that!

Both dimensions are responsive to the same question: what conditions allow a human being to genuinely flourish?

Nature offers its own answer to this, as it always has. “Adopt the pace of nature,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Her secret is patience.” Growth does not happen under force or pressure. It happens when the conditions are right: the right light, the right soil, the right temperature, the right time. And then, from within, the seed does what it was always designed to do.

The same is true of young people.

Dr Tara Swart’s work on the body’s intelligence points to something else here too: intuition, that native knowing, does not need to be taught. It needs to be protected. Reconnecting young people with their own inner signals, their felt sense, and their embodied intelligence is not remedial work. It is the most fundamental preparation for the life ahead.

When inner foundations are strong, possibility expands. Not because the outer world becomes easier. But because the young person is genuinely equipped to navigate it. Coherent. Grounded. Self-led. Able to listen to their own inner signals and act on them with confidence.

This is what Redefining Excellence From Within™ means in practice. Not performance under pressure. Not an achievement at any cost. Excellence as something built from the inside out, sustainable, self-directed, and genuinely the young person’s own.

Full Circle

The RHS Chelsea Gold Medal that Clare Bowman and Putney High School received in 2021 was a recognition of something that deserved to be seen. A body of research, brought to life in a space that people could actually walk into, breathe in, and be changed by.

I am deeply grateful for everything that working in that world taught me. For Clare’s vision and rigor. For the evidence that confirmed what the body already knows: that nature is not decoration. No environment is neutral. The spaces we inhabit shape what is possible within us.

And I am grateful for where that understanding led me.

Because the most important prepared environment is not the one around us. It is the one we build within.

When we tend both with equal intention, when we design the outer world with the same care we bring to strengthening the inner, something remarkable becomes possible.

Young people who are not just comfortable in beautiful classrooms but are genuinely equipped to thrive. Those who carry their own inner authority with them wherever they go. Who knows how to listen to themselves. Who trusts their own intelligence. Who are, in the fullest sense, prepared from within with the tools to unlock their potential.

That is the complete picture. The prepared environment, inside and out.

And that, I believe, is what we owe future generations.

References

Bowman, C., Bowman, R., & Bowman, D. (2019). The Biophilic Classroom: The Value of Nature in a Learning Environment. Putney High School, GDST.

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Delbridge, P. (2026). Unlock Your Power. HarperCollins.

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