Story URL: http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=99537
Story Retrieval Date: 5/25/2013 11:44:26 AM CST
Printer-Friendly Version
E-mail This Story
Plants: the Silent Healers
by Noelle Radut
Oct 01, 2008
Noelle Radut/MEDILL
Horticulturists agree that plants offer physical and cognitive benefits.
Interviews with two horticulturists and a garden specialist reveal how plants offer benefits to revitalizing home and family healthy.
With the latest Environmental Protection Agency data showing Chicago as a high-risk city for heightened pollution levels, cleaner air in the city and in the home is needed. Especially as winter sets in, stripping air of its moisture, indoor plants can serve as natural humidifiers.
“All winter long I’m in this lush, green jungle with a lot of humidity,” said William Garratt, a horticulturist at the Chalet, a landscape, nursery and garden center in Wilmette.
“Our ancestors were around nature all the time and we’ve become separated,” he added, “especially people who are in buildings all the time.”
With two greenhouses at the Chalet, Garratt said customers responded positively to the difference in moisture when entering the greenhouses, especially during colder months.
Wood said, “We sell more indoor plants in the winter than we do in summer… because [people] want something alive in their house. It brings them happiness.”
To help reduce such coarse winter effects as itchy skin and dry sinuses, Garratt recommends a green move: passing up the noisy and oftentimes-costly humidifier, and instead buying a few plants to increase indoor humidity.
His top recommendations include: lady palm, areca palm and bamboo palm. The latter two being especially good at removing chemicals, such as formaldehyde, often seeped in carpeting.
Referring to past NASA studies that cited cleaner air in closed environments containing plants, Garratt pointed out that having green plants has a positive effect on people.
Indoor plants also offer physical and cognitive benefits.
Johanna Leos, coordinator of horticultural therapy services at the Chicago Botanic Garden, said that plant interaction is essential to a person’s well-being.
She coordinates horticultural therapy sessions for patients, students and elderly people with physical, cognitive or psychosocial problems. These needs range from cancer, spinal chord injury, Alzheimer’s disease and depression, to post-traumatic stress disorder, autism, spina bifida and homelessness.
Working with plants indoors, she said, also helps with developing longer concentration spans, increasing short and long-term memory skills and aiding with problem solving.
Nurturing plants and watching them grow is also good for giving people a sense of anticipation, she said.
“Generally, having all of your senses stimulated every day results in a person having a more balanced life and a more balanced level of health,” Leos said. “So plants can fill part of that.”
Still, there are precautions for keeping indoor plants.
Leos recommended when purchasing, that buyers ask about safe, nontoxic and generally pest-resistant plants.
Garratt admitted that highly toxic plants are rare, and Wood agreed, “they don’t normally cultivate poisonous plants as indoor plants.” But both said that owners should be informed when purchasing a plant.
Wood also said that toxins in plants should be considered before purchasing a plant. Nurseries will usually provide plant information necessary to peg the species and/or genus name and information on how to properly care for them.
Wood recommended steering clear of dieffenbachia plants. Chewing them can lead to an allergic reaction such as a swollen tongue and even possible suffocation.
Wood says, “I probably would not have that plant [around] children and or animals. [But] these are not things that happen just by touching a plant, these are things that happen by chewing on a plant.”
For this reason Wood stressed the need for parents to talk to their children about home plants because, “kids love to take care of plants,” she said. “Just teach them how to do it correctly.”
