The real power of a flower
Skip the heart-shaped balloons, cards and chocolate this year and instead shower your loved ones with flowers for Valentine’s Day.
This will have multiple benefits. Firstly, flowers make people feel good. When researchers randomly approached women and gave them flowers their faces lit up in what the researchers identified as true, or Duchenne smiles. The researchers checked back three days later, and the women still felt uplifted.
Give flowers to the men you love too. Concerned that the flower effect was culturally gendered, the same researchers targeted men in lifts with single flowers and recorded the same true smiles, along with an increase in kindness. In a further study of men and women aged above 55, a gift of flowers improved memory as well as mood and social behaviours. The researchers concluded flowering plants have evolved to give us that brain boost. The more successful a plant is in making humans feel good, the more care we take to nurture it.
Fuchsia is flowering enthusiastically at the moment.Credit:iStock
The way plants make us feel is increasingly important as urbanisation removes us from the experience of plants in the wild. Increasingly people experience the wellbeing benefits of nature through the green infrastructure of their cities rather than through an engagement with either their own gardens or the bush. This change in human habitation demands a more sophisticated understanding of the range of effects of different plants on human wellbeing.
James Hitchmough, from the University of Sheffield, is a leader in this field. To trigger conversations about more effective urban landscape planting Hitchmough and a team of researchers looked at responses to a selection of designed landscapes. Their research found that landscapes consisting of about one-third flowers were considered the most beautiful, and that a landscape’s aesthetic appeal was linked to its perceived biodiversity. The incorporation of these kinds of findings into urban planning could change the look and feel of our cities. (Hitchmough will speak on planting design for cities at the Australian Landscape Conference in March.)
The more successful a plant is in making humans feel good, the more care we take to nurture it.
But back to Valentine's Day, and the multiple benefits of giving flowers. With drought threatening the livelihood of growers and nurserypeople, buying locally grown flowers or flowering plants is a lifeline. Potted flowering plants for indoors is a big market in Europe, but with our space and mild winters (shame about our new summers!) we have the luxury of growing them outdoors and have disregarded indoor opportunities.
Flowering plants are not long-term options for indoors, but will last at least as long as a bunch of flowers. Look for pots of mandevilla, fuchsia, gardenia, hibiscus, gerbera, New Guinea impatiens and Kalanchoe blossfeldiana, all flowering enthusiastically now, and willing to live inside for at least a week – or months in the case of the Kalanchoe. And make lots of people smile.