Green Plants and Biophilic Design

Plants are important in any biophilically designed place, but biophilic designing involves much more than just distributing a few plants around.

But since plants have come up, let’s start with them.

Seeing green leafy plants boosts our mood and cognitive performance (including helping us think more creatively, for all of you novel/poem/whatever writers, etc. out there) and cut our stress levels, which is also good for our health.  The phrase “green leafy” here is not to be ignored.  The benefits of seeing plants accrue when we look at the sorts of plants that would have been easy for our earliest ancestors to eat.  Separately, we’ve developed a preference for curvy things and find pointy ones scary, so cactuses with spines and spike-y leaf plants are not good choices for indoor companions.

How many plants are best?  Seeing one or two at a time provides the benefits noted and doesn’t stress us out by creating visual clutter (more on that later).

If you live in a place with bad natural light, if you always forget to water (if this is you, please don’t ever bring home a kitty, puppy, or baby), or if things just seem to die on your watch (see again, the early point about kitties, puppies, and babies), a good fake green leafy plant will work fine.  You know a good artificial plant when you see one; its one that you need to reach out and touch to make sure it’s actually real.  Do remember if you invest in good artificial plants (and they can be an investment, and worth making), to dust them every so often.  A real plant with a thick coating of dust fuzz and pet hair would be dead, and so seeing bunches of dust, etc., on a fake plant makes it clear that it is artificial, which blows the whole scene you’re trying to create.