The Therapeutic Effects of Houseplants

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Just after she had just had a baby, Jennifer Lauck received the gift of an orchid. She was secretly taken aback. “Look lady,” she wanted to tell her friend, “don’t give me an orchid right now.”

As Lauck, a bestselling author based in Portland, Ore., described in “Show Me the Way,” her memoir about parenting, she wanted to confess, “I can’t keep this slice of floral perfection alive. I can barely keep my kids and myself alive. What in the world are you trying to do to me here, break my back under the weight of yet another demand to keep life going? How much more life can I be responsible for?”

Houseplants beautify any space. They filter the air. They give us a sense of serenity. But if you’ve rarely or never had one in your home, you probably feel unsure or even a bit of stress when you think about owning a plant. Like Lauck, you may think a houseplant is the last thing you need. Or perhaps you’ve told yourself that you “don’t have a green thumb.” Maybe some have died in the past. In any case, you may believe that that you can’t keep any houseplant alive.

What if you’re wrong? What if you can add greenery and calm to your home, office, or other space with thriving, happy houseplants? When you get yourself some living, breathing houseplants, you won’t just be adding beauty to your indoor spaces, you will also be embarking on a journey to improve your mental and physical health.

Indoor Plants May Reduce Stress on the Body and Mind

In 2015, a team of Korean and Japanese scientists sought to compare how young people’s nervous systems responded to computer-related activities versus plant-related activities. They randomly assigned two groups of young men to different tasks. Twelve were asked to transplant an indoor plant. Twelve were asked to work on a computer task. Then the participants switched tasks. During and after each activity, the scientists evaluated the subjects’ psychological and physical health.

When working with the plants, the participants reported feeling more comfortable and soothed. Their physiological markers of stress were reduced. Working with plants even lowered their blood pressure.

The research team concluded that interacting with houseplants may help combat the growing problem of “technostress,” the increasingly prevalent feeling of being overwhelmed and never finished, induced by working with computers. “Our results suggest that active interaction with indoor plants can reduce physiological and psychological stress compared with mental work,” they wrote, adding that working with plants promoted “comfortable, soothed, and natural feelings.”

Mental and Emotional Benefits of Having Houseplants

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Other research and my personal experience indicate that houseplants can help you:

Alleviate Anxiety

Transplanting your houseplants is a soothing task, but just looking at the greenery in your home or office will help you feel less anxious.

Lift Your Mood

Your green babies, once you have some, will help improve your mood. “I love having that green and sense of life and energy in my indoor space,” says Debra Owensby, a real estate agent based in Greenville, S.C. “I hate walking into a dead space. Plants really lift me up.”

Increase Your Imagination

Most of us spend upwards of 90% of our time indoors, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Bringing the outdoors inside by growing houseplants does more than just give a natural, outdoor feel to indoor spaces. At least half a dozen studies, including research done in Romania in 2015 by scientists at the University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine and a 2013 study conducted at the University of Exeter in the U.K., suggest that plants inside the home or workspace can improve creativity, problem-solving skills, productivity, concentration, and even memory.

Care for Your Air

Plants “breathe in” carbon dioxide and “breathe out” oxygen; this process helps clean the air. According to Dr. Vadoud Niri, an analytical chemist and associate professor at State University of New York at Oswego, houseplants can also clean the air of common airborne chemicals that cause harmful health effects, like headaches and runny noses. In one experiment Dr. Niri conducted in his laboratory, a dracaena was able to suck up more than 90% of acetone (a volatile chemical found in nail polish and other products) in the air.

“Use a variety of plants to make sure you take all types of VOCs [volatile organic compounds] from your indoor air,” Dr. Niri recommends in an educational video produced by Scientific American. An oft-cited 1989 experiment conducted by NASA scientists similarly found that a variety of different houseplants were effective at reducing harmful volatile compounds in the air.

Heal Your Body

A widely publicized experiment on mice published in the journal Neuroscience in 2007 found that a soil bacterium, Mycobacterium vaccae, was an effective mood booster akin to anti-depressants. Two years later, research from Kansas State University scientists revealed that patients recovering from surgery who had plants in their room reported experiencing less pain, anxiety, and fatigue than patients who recovered in post-op rooms with no plants. And in 2019, a team of researchers in Taiwan and Hong Kong discovered that older adults in houses without houseplants were exposed to much more indoor air pollution and had higher blood pressure and incidence of cardiovascular effects than older adults who lived with plants in their homes, indicating that houseplants are even good for the heart.

Getting Started: The Dos and Don’ts of Houseplants

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Do ask your friends who already have lush indoor jungles to give you a cutting or two of easy-to-grow indoor plants. A lot of people buy and sell houseplants online and Facebook and other social media sites are full of plant-lover groups. But almost any plant enthusiast will be eager to help you get started. You can bring your cutting home and place it in a jar of water in indirect light. Once the roots begin to grow, find a clay or ceramic pot with a drainage hole. Line the bottom of the pot with pebbles, add some potting soil, and plant your start. Presto, and congratulations: You are now growing your first houseplant.

Don’t spend a lot of money on exotic houseplants. The truth is it’s better to start with some easy-to-grow cuttings in water than with expensive well-established potted plants. That way you won’t be potentially wasting your money on fussy plants that, as a novice, you may not be able to keep alive.

Do write down instructions for each plant and keep those instructions either staked in the soil of the plant, taped to the side of the pot, or placed somewhere nearby. Each of your houseplants will need slightly different care, depending on how much sun they get, the humidity of your indoor space, the temperature, the season of the year, and the plant species, among other things.

Don’t think you will remember specific care instructions. Unless you are an experienced gardener, you’ll need a cheat sheet for each of your plants.

Do start with a pothos, the perfect starter plant, as they are easy to keep alive, still thrive even if you forget to water them or water them too much, and can do well in both the sun and the shade, though they prefer moderate indirect light. They propagate easily, as well, so if you can get a start from a plant lover or a garden store, you will be off and running.

Pothos, like the one here, are forgiving starter plants, and easy to propagate too. JulieK2/Shutterstock

Don’t assume you can’t grow plants inside because you don’t have enough light. Many easy-to-grow houseplants are very happy in shady spots. These include the purple- and green-leafed Tradescantia zebrina (“wandering dude”), many varieties of begonias and philodendrons, and almost any pothos.

Do try again even if you kill your first, second, or third plant. You will find which green pets do well in your care. Even if one or two die, your skills will improve and you may very well have a greener thumb than you think. You just have to find the varieties right for you.

Don’t think that you can’t be a plant parent. When I gave an aloe cutting to a friend, hers doubled in size in less than a month; her windowsill and watering style are perfect for it. In the meantime, my mother aloe plant died.

Conversely, my friend could not keep her lucky bamboo (Dracaena sanderiana, a tropical water plant) alive, while mine thrived. Aloe likes very little water, to be crowded in a small pot, and to dry out fully between waterings. Lucky bamboo, which has a reputation for being a difficult plant to grow indoors, thrives in a shallow pot filled with pebbles, but only if it is watered and spritzed almost daily. My friend and I both have homes filled with plants; I have more than 70 growing on every available surface. Even so, the plants that do well in my friend’s home don’t necessarily thrive in mine.

What about Jennifer’s Lauck’s orchid, with the burst of purple in the center of each of its paper-white flowers? Lauck touched one of the petals and was surprised to find that the elegant flower was a lot sturdier than it looked. In that moment, she realized the orchid was not just a gift, but also a teacher, a reminder to a harried young mom that she would eventually regain her sense of balance.

Houseplants are beautiful, health-giving, and mood-boosting. They may be rooted in place, but they help us humans get to where we want to be.

This article was originally published in Radiant Life magazine.