Tag: houseplants

aerial view of a glass bowl of succulent plants
Posted in Personal life

The Healing Power of Houseplants

Posted on by Debbie Young

In this month’s issue of the Hawkesbury Parish News, I create my own indoor spring

In the middle of a grim January in which fog and frost have rendered the local Cotswold landscape monotone, I crave the sight of colour. I know that even just looking at greenery is scientifically proven to offer mental health benefits, but I’m unable to buy any from shops as they’re not essential foodstuffs. So I ask on the local Facebook Second-to-None group whether anyone has spare houseplants in need of a good home, ie mine.

Immediately a flurry of kind offers pops up, including some plants rumoured to be unkillable.

By all accounts, the spider plants and aloe veras are likely to outlive me. I must remember to provide for them in my will.

Further investigation shows that house plants can serve other functions besides lifting your spirits, such as clearing toxins from indoor air. No less than NASA has run tests of three common houseplants to see which was best at removing formaldehyde, with spider plants emerging the clear winner.

Indoor pollution prevention in a plant pot should be handy on the International Space Station, not to mention making the place feel more homely.

Apparently certain palms, ferns, peace lilies, ivy and rubber plants are even better at extracting chemical vapours indoors, although I’m not sure what they do with them once they’ve collected them. Interior design specialists credit houseplants with reducing headaches, sore throats and other minor ailments in the workplace and the home.

Aloe vera is another plant no home should be without. Keep one by the cooker as a first aid measure and apply the juice of a leaf to burns to speed healing. Aloe vera is also anti-inflammatory, promotes circulation, and inhibits the growth of bacteria. A multi-million-dollar industry, Forever Living, has been built on aloe-vera-based products.

According to Marina Pogose, aloe vera “grows like the devil”, so I’m guessing the company never runs out of stock.

A few days after I’ve distributed my new houseplants about my home, I visit my GPs’ surgery for my annual health MOT, where I’m startled to learn that I weigh the same as I did at the start of the first lockdown and my blood pressure and pulse, which were healthy enough then, have actually improved. I’ve scarcely been out of doors for a year, and I’ve done very little physical exercise, so there can only be one reason that I’m doing so well now.

When I find out which of my new houseplants is responsible, I’ll let you know.

With grateful thanks to Chris, Jenny, Jill, Kate, Maia, Marina and Penny for all their kind offers of plants.

IN OTHER NEWS

To celebrate having lived in Hawkesbury Upton for thirty years, I’ve just published in paperback and as an ebook Still Charmed, my latest collection of columns for the Hawkesbury Parish News, written from 2016-2020 – an extraordinary period that saw huge change around the world. The book is available to buy online via the links below. 

 

Posted in Personal life

How Green Was My Pot Plant

Posted on by Debbie Young
BIG Aspidistra
Image by gadgetgirl2007 via Flickr

Keeping a pot plant on your desk is meant to make you more creative, happier and healthier.  But if your desk is in an old cottage with small windows and not much natural light, that’s easier said than done.

Especially if you’re not very good with pot plants.  I tried hard in my first flat, (light and airy with floor-to-ceiling windows), but I still couldn’t get much more than tradescantia to survive.  I once overheard my father saying to a visitor “And this is the area where Debbie tortures plants”.

Not long after that, I had the opportunity to learn from a master of the art of desktop gardening.  I went to work in an open-plan office where my desk adjoined that of Gloria.  Gloria loved houseplants so much that her desk resembled a small rainforest.  She certainly had green fingers: some of the plants were almost as big as she was.  Her massive money-plant seemed particularly auspicious, given that this was a sales office.  We were a happy and successful team until one day management asked her to cut back a bit on the undergrowth.  She took umbrage at this and felled the lot.  Things were never quite the same in our office again.

But now I don’t need green fingers because I’ve discovered some fabulously realistic plastic pot plants in Ikea.  They are pleasingly tidy, don’t need watering and have a restful, refreshing effect on any room.  I’ve just installed a pair of them on the windowsill above my desk.  Whenever I glance up from my work, they almost seem to smile back at me.  I’m so taken with them that I think I’ll invest in a few more.  One for the bathroom, two for the kitchen, then maybe I’ll move onto the bedroom.

But not yet.  This weekend my gardening efforts will have to be redirected out of doors.  I’ve a conservatory full of vegetable plants, thanks to the Gardening Club’s recent sale, and they all need to be transferred to the garden.  I wonder if Ikea makes convincing plastic vegetables?  They’d be so much easier to maintain.  But hang on, with the barbecue summer the weather forecasters have got lined up for us, they might melt.  And in any case, I’d never get them past the judges on Show Day.

This post was first published in the June 2010 issue of the Hawkesbury Parish News.