Regardless of the season, spending time outdoors in nature has health benefits. The fresh air, flowers, and plants evoke a sense of happiness. Further, the assortments of colorful flowers and the green foliage, plus fascinating shapes, tend to trigger mental relaxation. That said, interacting with plants has an impact on our neural pathways, making us feel joyful and refreshed. While a walk in the park can trigger the same feeling, it doesn’t beat that of a private garden. Adding outdoor plants in Pakistan to your home or garden is a great way to bring this natural calm and beauty right to your doorstep.
Benefits of Outdoor Plants
Helps with Mental Relaxation
Mental wellness is as important as physical wellness. Therefore, interacting with outdoor plants can help you with mental relaxation and well-being. Further, it’s powerful when it comes to relieving anxiety, depression, and stress. Also, did you know that green plants can help with lowering hypertension? Yes, the green color triggers a neural response that helps counteract rising blood pressure.
Ecotherapy
Ever heard of ecotherapy? Well, outdoor plants can help you with that. Thanks to this form of therapy, you can appreciate personal growth, individual healing, and psychotherapeutic healing. It also helps participants foster an eco-friendly lifestyle. Besides, it can also help people suffering from Alzheimer’s and Dementia.
Enhance the Immune System
While we all know the vitamin D we get from the sun helps with flu and cold. But, the dirt from the garden is also helpful health-wise. By interacting with the garden soil, you’ll get a daily dose of Mycobacterium vaccae. This healthy bacterium gets into your body via eating veggies or inhalation. And it helps relieve asthma, allergies, and psoriasis symptoms.
Encourages Healthy Eating
Besides flowers as your outdoor plants, you can also grow vegetables, spices, and fruits. Thanks to that, you can enjoy a healthier diet. And if you have kids, this is one way you can encourage them to eat healthy foods. Further, planting and harvesting from your garden mean you can control what’s used on them. As such, it’s a chance to avoid foods sprayed with harmful pesticides.
Helps with Social Interactions
Spending more time interacting with outdoor plants can help with social interactions, especially if you’re poor at making friends. Thanks to such interactions, you can fight loneliness and depression. In addition, you can always stop by the community garden for more inspiration when you’re free. It allows you to get new ideas that you can incorporate into your home garden. And that’s beside the new friends you’ll make there.
It counts as an Exercise
Daily exercises can help improve general flexibility, endurance, and most importantly, the health of your heart. Spending a few minutes taking care of your outdoor plants can help lower the chance of getting certain illnesses. And that includes obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure. And for those with any of these diseases, you can minimize their symptoms thanks to outdoor plants.
Promotes a good night’s sleep
Having a good sleep sometimes can be hard, especially if many things are bothering your mind. However, if you work in your outdoor garden, you can lower mental stress, lower anxiety, and get tired. As you know, all these are the recipe for a good night’s sleep.
Concentration and Memory
Being around plants helps people concentrate better in the home and workplace. Studies show that tasks performed while under the calming influence of nature are performed better and with greater accuracy, yielding a higher quality result. Moreover, being outside in a natural environment can improve memory performance and attention span by twenty percent.
Keeping ornamental plants in the home
Keeping ornamental plants in the home and in the workplace increases memory retention and concentration. The calming influence of natural environments is conducive to positive work environments by increasing a person’s ability to concentrate on the task at hand. Work performed under the natural influence of ornamental plants is normally of higher quality and completed with a much higher accuracy rate than work done in environments devoid of nature. Going outside or being under the influence of plants can increase memory retention up to twenty percent, a recent University of Michigan study showed. The effect of nature in the home and in the workplace serves to stimulate both the senses and the mind, improving mental cognition and performance.
Flowers Generate Happiness
Having flowers around the home and office greatly improves people’s moods and reduces the likelihood of stress-related depression. Flowers and ornamental plants increase levels of positive energy and help people feel secure and relaxed. Keeping flowers around the home and in the workplace greatly reduces a person’s stress levels. Natural aesthetic beauty is soothing to people, and keeping ornamental flowers around the home environment is an excellent way to lower levels of stress and anxiety. People who keep flowers in their home feel happier, less stressed, and more relaxed. As a result of the positive energy they derive from the environment, the chances of suffering from stress-related depression are decreased as well. Overall, adding flowers to your home or work environment reduces your perceived stress levels and makes you feel more relaxed, secure, and happy. Flowers can help you achieve a more optimistic outlook on your life, bringing you both pleasing visual stimulation and helping you to increase your perceived happiness.
Health and Recreation
Access to parks and recreational activities is positively correlated with rates of physical activity, which improves mood and contributes to overall healthiness. Health care costs are subsequently reduced. Parks and urban green spaces impact people’s health by providing them with an inexpensive (often free) and convenient recreational service. There is a positive correlation between the presence of a park in a neighborhood and the level of physical activity of the residents; people are much more likely to exercise when there is a no-cost, aesthetically pleasing area or facility for them to use. As a result, residents of neighborhoods with beautiful parks are much healthier; their increased exercise makes them less susceptible to physical ailments and more resilient against minor illnesses. As a result, these residents do not spend as much each year on health care and medical treatment, because they require fewer of these services. Healthy people are happier people; residents who exercise often have excellent overall health and therefore have a more positive mental outlook. The presence of parks in neighborhoods encourages residents to exercise, thus improving their physical state and enabling them to more fully enjoy their lives.
Accelerates Healing Process
The presence of plants in hospital recovery rooms and/or views of aesthetically pleasing gardens helps patients to heal faster, due to the soothing effects of ornamental horticulture.
Shrubs, trees, and flowers have a practical application in hospitals: the presence of plants in patient recovery rooms greatly reduces the time necessary to heal. The soothing effects of ornamental flowers and plants are so great that simply having daily views of flowers and other ornamental plants in landscaped areas outside the patient recovery room significantly speeds up recovery time. Another technique to decrease recovery time is horticulture therapy, where patients care for and nurture plants themselves. Patients who physically interact with plants experience a significantly reduced recovery time after medical procedures.
Improves Relationships/Compassion
Research shows that people who spend extended lengths of time around plants tend to have better relationships with others. This is due to measurable increases in feelings of compassion; another effect of exposure to ornamental plants. Ornamental plants affect the levels of compassion that people feel for others. Studies have shown that people who spend more time around plants are much more likely to try and help others and often have more advanced social relationships. People who care for nature are more likely to care for others, reaching out to their peers and forming shared bonds resulting from their common interests. Extended exposure to nature and wildlife increases people’s compassion for each other as it increases people’s compassion for the environment in which they live. In short, being around plants can help to improve relationships between people and increase their concern and empathy toward others.
Improved Human Performance/Energy
Spending time in natural environments makes people better at doing their jobs. It also increases energy levels and feelings of vitality. Spending time in nature gives people an increased feeling of vitality, increasing their energy levels and making them feel more animated. Their performance levels are, in turn, increased by this improved state of mind. Natural environments induce a positive outlook on life, making people feel more alive and active. When people experience increased vigor, they put more of themselves and their energy into their work. Plants can help people to improve their performance at work and at home by increasing their perceived vitality and giving them more feelings of added energy.
Final Take
Plants are a great way to liven a city space, academic campus, business lobby, and/or exterior, shared residential spaces, or even your own backyard. We want to make it as easy as possible for a business or municipality to create these tranquil places for their residents, customers, or employees. Our large commercial planters are a long-lasting product that will help you create beautiful plantings that can even accommodate larger bushes or trees. You can easily find a wide variety of plants and planters through an online nursery Lahore, making it simple and convenient to transform any space into a lush green environment.
