Houseplants Will Brighten Your Home And Your Day
Did you know houseplants can brighten your day?
We humans have a positive affinity to growing things. Trees, plants and flowers all have a beneficial effect on people’s health and well being. It’s part of the reason we enjoy being outdoors on a nice day. The sight and sound of all things growing, blossoming and blooming help raise our mood and brighten our spirit.
This is really no surprise. We are creatures of nature. We evolved from nature and, someday, each of us will return back to nature. In some sense, you could say that plants are in our blood.
Houseplants are an excellent way to bring the bounty of nature indoors, so that we are capable of enjoying this natural, holistic effect year-round. The simple addition of something green and living seems to perk up any room, making it a more pleasant place to be in.
This is especially true here, in the Upper Midwest where the winters are long and often brutal. A room full of healthy, growing houseplants can go a long way to making our long winters a lot more tolerable.
Additionally, caring for houseplants have been shown to alleviate the effects of seasonal affective disorder, commonly known as SAD. SAD is essentially seasonal depression. As the days grow shorter in northern latitudes, the reduction of light has a negative effect on some people’s moods. Having houseplants around counters the dreariness of winter by brightening up a home. This, in turn, tends to brighten the moods of those caring for the plants.
Did you know that houseplants also clean the air around them? It’s true. The average houseplant can clean the equivalent of 100 square feet of air every day. They do this by naturally removing many harmful organic compounds from household air, replacing them with pure oxygen. Houseplants are such efficient air scrubbers that NASA has even studied using them in space. This may be another reason why most people feel better with plants around them.
Many common houseplants are quite easy to care for. All they need is adequate light, water and an occasional dusting. They are also quite resilient to temperature change. This is because all species of houseplants have been specifically adapted to grow, you guessed it, in a house! So, even if you have two brown thumbs, you can successfully fill your winter months with the green all of us so desperately need.
Don’t believe you can keep houseplants alive? Check out the book What’s Wrong With My Plant for some time-tested plant remedies.
