The Out in Nature trail is a collaboration between University of Exeter students, researchers, the grounds team and visitors. To think queerness and nature together is a powerful intervention into persistent and harmful ideas that LGBTQ+ identities are somehow ‘against nature’. Each location invites you to explore the queerness of nature on campus and introduces a moment for reflection.
Visiting the Out in Nature trail
You can explore the trail digitally or by visiting Streatham campus during opening hours. The trail has no beginning or end. It doesn’t follow a set route. You can take as little or as long as you like to explore it. We invite you to find your own path, or to wander without direction. If you want to follow the shortest route between trail points, starting near the Queen’s Building and ending near Amory, you can walk the trail in the following order: 9, 2, 7, 6, 10, 5, 1, 3, 8, 4.
Accessibility
This trail contains uneven terrain. Please see further information about Streatham campus here to check for step-free access. Alternatively, you can make use of the digital version of the trail.
You can also download the trail guide in the following alternative PDF formats: large print, high-contrast and easy-read.
We hope you enjoy the trail!
This project was funded by an AHRC Impact Acceleration award in 2025.
Theo Brown (1914-1993) was a lecturer in Comparative Religion at the University of Exeter. As a prolific folklorist, she gathered a large collection of stories about Devon’s supernatural history. Brown’s research interests included reported sightings of ghost dogs across the South West. According to Brown’s article ‘The Black Dog’, published in the journal Folklore in 1958, the figure of the ghost dog is “far more widespread than one would have imagined, astonishingly persistent, and perplexingly versatile, serving as an image for a very large assortment of situations” (188). Brown also suggests that dogs are “more friendly than has been supposed” (188) – and make kin with other beings, including spectral playmates.
Brown’s work gives us the chance to consider what queer connections we might have with our fellow beings, fleshly or spectral, and allows us to embrace unexpected and unusual forms of queer kinship. Queer, in this context, is less about labelling someone’s identity or sexuality, and more about embracing unexpected forms of relationality, including with the natural (and supernatural) world. Our queer nature trail invites you to follow unexpected paths, be open to unexpected encounters, and embrace curiosity and surprise, just as Theo Brown did, to see what you might discover. What forms of queer kinship are you keen to explore?
What kinds of queer connections across the years – even centuries – can we find by looking to nature? For over 2,000 years, the violet has been associated with sapphic love, dating back to the sixth century BCE and the poetry of Sappho. Celebrated as “the greatest of passionate lyric poets,” Sappho has become a global icon of lesbian love. Although only around 400 lines of her poetry survive, these fragments are rich with queer floral imagery:
And how many wreaths of the violet
And the sweet rose together met
You’ve bound about your hair,
And round your pretty throat how plenty
Chains of a hundred flowers and twenty
Sappho herself was often described as “violet-weaving” or “violet-crowned.” These associations have secured the violet’s place in queer cultural memory. Wild violets flourish on campus from October to May. Their untamed growth reflects the very queerness they symbolise – defying normative structures and refusing to be boxed in – echoing Sappho’s legacy and reminding us that queerness flourishes beyond imposed boundaries.
What might we learn from the gentle unruliness of the violet? Where else in nature do you find meaning and inspiration? What symbols – floral or otherwise – speak to your own identity? And how might reclaiming these symbols help preserve queer histories or create new meanings?
The ability of plants to thrive in the most hostile places has long inspired queer writers. In the 1980s and 90s, artist Derek Jarman created a rugged garden at his home on the shores of Dungeness. In the shadow of a nuclear power station and battered by coastal winds, the landscape was far from ideal, yet Jarman planted joyfully and without boundaries.
Living with HIV at a time of intense stigma, Jarman’s Garden became a defiant act of resilience, connection, and belonging. It was not manicured or conventional, but wild, collaborative, and full of care. Plants, such as viper’s bugloss, sea kale, lavender, and mullein, which had found a way to belong and thrive amongst the shale and wind, provided a source of inspiration for Jarman, who developed a symbiotic bond that gave him strength. In one of his final diary entries, Jarman wrote: “I do not wish to die … yet. I would love to see my garden through several summers.”
These alpine planters provide shelter for plants to thrive far from their native habitats, reminding us that beauty and care can emerge anywhere. What kind of garden – literal or metaphorical – would you cultivate for yourself and for others?
How do LGBTQ+ communities thrive outside of major cities? Often, we assume that queer people can only find community and express themselves authentically by moving from the countryside or regional cities to larger metropolises. But queer communities and spaces of belonging can thrive in other spaces, too.
Exeter University’s LGBTQ+ Society – initially known as “GaySoc” – was founded in the mid-1970s. GaySoc aimed to connect and give a safe space to members of Exeter’s gay community. Articles published in Exeter’s old student-run newspapers, The South Westerner and Signature, give insight into the local queer community over the decades. These are held at the Old Library’s “Special Collections” archive, a treasure trove of local history. Stories from the newspaper prove the existence of a community that would socialize in Cornwall House, Devonshire House and Northcott Theatre. Activities ranged from engaging with queer-focused art to planning transport to go to the early Hyde Park Pride Marches following the Stonewall Riots.
Although the newspapers’ viewpoints were largely progressive, the existence of discrimination on campus was clear. The newspaper covered “funny” excerpts about SEXETER, stating it was “OK to be gay at Exeter, as long as you strap yourself under the carpet” (an outdated idiom meaning to keep it a secret!). It also published letters which amplified GaySoc’s struggles, for example that posters promoting GaySoc’s socials had been ripped down.
What are the difficulties – and potential benefits – of building political and activist movements outside of major cities?
Since the summer of 2024, young LGBTQ+ people from schools around Devon and Cornwall have met on campus to participate in workshops, spend time with each other, and develop a sense of community. The gathering is organised by the Intercom Trust, the largest LGBTQ+ charity in the South West of England, which was founded in 1997. Led by and for the community, the Intercom Trust offers support, advocacy, and counselling for LGBTQ+ people. As part of their work, they aim to enhance the lives of young LGBTQ+ people by working with Secondary Schools in Cornwall and Devon.
In 2025, the Out in Nature team welcomed more than 150 LGBTQ+ students to our campus and ran a workshop to develop the Out in Nature trail. The young people responded enthusiastically and thoughtfully to the challenge of understanding and perceiving the natural world as queer. Some of their responses focused on the importance of experiencing nature with others.
Which spaces have allowed you to develop a sense of connection, community, or solidarity with others? What role has the natural world played in this context? How can we create opportunities for younger (and older people) to build community whether in nature or not?
How does the natural world help us imagine new ways of being together? How might a connection with lichen help queer youth envision lives beyond the routine and expected? How might a crow invite us to reconsider gender performativity and body image? These were questions I didn’t know to ask – until students at a workshop uncovered them by embracing their queer-curious selves in nature. Such questions are a celebration of queer imagination – its capacity to disrupt what so often feels fixed. They resonate with the work of other queer questioners who have dared to dream beyond.
For example, the painting Scylla by artist Ithell Colquhoun imagines the dissolving of boundaries between human and more-than-human life as a gesture of female empowerment. Echoes of Scylla are present in the work of artist Ro Robertson, whose imaginative engagements with the Cornish coastline help question the fixity of how we understand concepts of gender.
As you interact with this trail, be open and queer in your curiosity. How might connecting with nature – through things like moss, lichen, or even a curious crow – help us imagine new ways of living, expressing ourselves, and being together, especially for those who feel outside the norm?
“I raced back into the closet at a hundred miles an hour and I stayed there.” When Rebecca arrived at Exeter University in the 1990s to do her teacher training, she felt she had to hide who she was. She wasn’t the only one. At the time she was at Exeter, Section 28 was in force. This was a piece of homophobic legislation that banned the “promotion” of homosexuality, creating an atmosphere of fear, uncertainty, and self-censorship, and denying generations of LGBTQ+ people information, representation, and support. It was only repealed in England and Wales in 2003.
Section 28 tried to erase queer identities. Today we see many worrying parallels, with attacks on hard-won LGBTQ+ rights – and particularly trans and non-binary identities – on the rise globally.
Yet then, as now, efforts to erase queer people are met with resistance. At this spot, in May 2025, staff and students gathered to protest attacks on trans rights and show solidarity. The previous year, on this very same spot, queer and trans folks were part of a coalition that sustained a months-long student encampment for Palestine. These haven’t left physical traces. But histories and memories of erasure and resistance indelibly shape how we see particular places.
Are there specific spaces that you associate with erasure and resistance?
The sculpture of a seagull by Barbara Jones reminds us of the poetry collection Whether a Dove or Seagull by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) and Valentine Ackland (1906-1969). Warner and Ackland were writers and lifelong partners who spent their adulthood in rural Dorset. Published in 1934, Whether a Dove or Seagull troubles our understanding of authorship since none of the poems are signed, leaving readers to guess whether Warner or Ackland had written them. Collectively, the poems engage with the natural world and questions of queer belonging in nature. Special Collections hold a first edition alongside other archival material related to the couple.
Warner and Ackland championed environmental causes and the rights of rural communities: Warner’s early fiction explored how witchcraft and paganism could allow women and queer people to connect to nature. The couple were communists, and Ackland wrote critically about rural poverty and land workers’ dependence on local landowners. Towards the end of her life, after Ackland’s death from cancer in 1969, Warner protested nuclear power.
What does environmental activism mean to you? Whose interests dominate political movements? Who is excluded or overlooked? Is it easier for some people to exist in, or relate to, nature?
Queer ecology challenges binarism and taxonomies. It embraces the complexity, fluidity, and entangled relations of living relational systems, which defy systems of classification imposed by Western scientific frameworks. Flora can be dioecious (like Yew), meaning that male and female reproductive organs are found on separate trees. They can also be monoecious, where flowers may be unisexual or bisexual. Bisexual flowers include chasmogamous types that invite pollinators and cleistogamous types that self-fertilise in secret. This diversity complicates the idea of fixed sex or static reproductive roles.
This oak tree offers a powerful symbol of queer ecology – not just in its monoecious flowering (separate male and female flowers on the same plant), but in its relationship to other forms of flora and fauna it supports and sustains. Oaks can host over 2,000 species: fungi intertwined with roots; squirrels bury acorns and chew through labels; mosses, lichen, beetles, and birds all making their homes in and around the oak’s body. Perceived this way, the oak becomes a site of radical interdependence – an ecosystem that queers the idea of a single, bounded organism.
Sit with this oak or another tree. Who and what depends on it? How might its entangled life forms expand your understanding of community, identity, or kinship?
Ants. Slugs. Worms. Bugs. Vermin. Not all queer nature is pretty. What can we learn by letting go of the desirable and attractive, and instead turn towards the unwanted and ugly mess of nature?
Take badgers, for example. Badgers have a long history of violence perpetrated against them – for example by being culled as vermin on suspicion of carrying disease. These forms of violence have been experienced in strikingly similar ways by the queer community.
In contrast, snails can offer a glimpse into a world in which gender and sexuality are redefined. Most of these little gastropod molluscs can’t be divided into male and female. Depending on species, a snail can have a full set of reproductive organs that produce eggs and sperm. Some find a sexual partner, others can self-fertilise. Our human categories of gender and sexuality are completely inadequate to describe these fellow earth dwellers.
Take a look around you. What kind of nature is considered beautiful, useful and healing? What might we learn from non-human campus dwellers who are overlooked or rejected?
If you’re interested in finding out more about creative ways to learn from ugly bugs and other queer kin, check out the links below.
