Go Green: Bring the Garden Inside for Health and Beauty

Living walls, container-grown vegetables, blooming flowers, and air-freshening greenery can enhance your decor, improve your health and boost your brain power. Bringing your garden indoors is easier than you might think with modern growing techniques.

The benefits of “greening” go beyond the visual, according to psychologists and mental health professionals. It has long been acknowledged that a walk in the woods or even a glimpse of green from an office window can relieve tension, boost productivity and foster creativity. Gardening is a traditional “fall-back” activity for stressed adults, and school gardens show increasing promise for student engagement and academic achievement.

Bring the Benefits Home

Now, the advisability of transplanting the garden — or, at least, some of it — to home interiors is gaining traction among designers, environmentalists and medical professionals. Plants, it turns out, supply many of the same benefits to humans that pets provide. The care that they require can boost self-esteem, ward off loneliness and depression, and have distinct physical effects, including lowering blood pressure and cholesterol levels. Doctors and dentists have fish tanks and live plants in their waiting rooms for the same reason: They are calming.

The Other Benefits of Indoor Gardening

But indoor gardens have other benefits as well. They can be a source of culinary herbs and edible produce. Plants improve air quality, act as natural humidifiers and air fresheners, and are pleasant to look at. Plants adapt to indoor environments easily, benefit from controlled temperature and the absence of pests, and extend their beneficial goodness to small apartment dwellers as well as to residents of sprawling single-family homes.

If you have previously grown aloe vera or culinary herbs in a sunny kitchen window, or cultivated common house plants, you no doubt know the basics of indoor gardening — water and an occasional nutrient dose. Today, though, indoor gardens have gone “big time!” Hydroponic tomato systems that produce all winter, strawberry towers that supply fruit as well as color, and aquaponic growing systems that combine fish and plants in one closed-loop “water garden” represent a new trend. It’s the latest of sustainable lifestyles.

Green Concepts & Sustainability

As you survey your home needs and your living habits, if you envision improvements to enhance spatial efficiency and personal enjoyment, consider your total environment in terms of green concepts and ongoing sustainability. Take a look at aesthetics as well as cost and function, both as you select modern bathroom vanities and as you hone in on the extras that will add individuality.

Life in the 21st Century is fast-paced, technology-oriented and rapidly changing. More than ever before, the home front is the place to relax, renew and recharge, not only the batteries on all your devices but your own sense of purpose. To neglect the availability of a way to do that naturally, with the aid of green plants and growing things is to squander resources that are readily available.

Living, Thriving Walls

“Living walls” thrive in the moist environment of a bathroom, but they can be an architectural feature worth considering in any room, and can be adapted to any function, producing food, transforming physical space and adding psychological benefits. Look for ideas in design magazines, at local nurseries and garden shops, and build on your own knowledge and interests. Modern methods don’t require that you get dirt under your fingernails, but the gardens of the future point to a new direction for living well.

If you would rather cultivate orchids than pick your own beans, that’s perfectly all right. But if your inner gourmet would be delighted by the prospect of having fresh dill for your dinner’s salmon or fresh mint for your tea, the possibilities are open.

It’s a new dawn of gardening, and you don’t have to worry about storms!

Images Courtesy of Canva.