The psychological benefits of interior plants

There is now a wealth of evidence to show that putting plants in buildings can significantly reduce absence from work. It isn’t necessary to fill every available space with a plant to achieve this; just a few good-quality specimens located near to where people work and take their rest breaks seem to suffice. The reasons why this has a beneficial effect are probably a subtle but complex mixture of the physiological (improved humidity, reduced noise etc., which are explored later in this module) and the psychological.

Early studies

The belief that vegetation may influence psychological behaviour has been suggested for many years. As early as 1870, Olmsted proposed that access to vegetation in large towns would reduce the stress felt by urban dwellers, by blocking out the associations they held with the demands of daily work and living. The number of office workers taking an al fresco lunch in our city parks during the summer shows how right he was!

In the 1980s, Professor Roger Ulrich and his colleagues in the USA showed that hospital patients recovering from major surgery suffered fewer post-operative ill effects if they had a view of nature, as opposed to a view of buildings, through their window. They were discharged sooner, had fewer post-operative side effects, such as nausea and headaches, needed fewer and weaker painkillers and were less demanding of nursing staff. Further studies, using volunteers and pictures of urban and rural landscapes, confirmed that scenes of nature lower stress levels, facts that have both economic and healthcare implications.


Latest research

Ulrich’s studies are important but it was not until the 1990s that researchers homed in on interior planting. Scientific reports from researchers at universities in the USA (Lohr), Netherlands (van Dortmont), Norway (Fjeld) and the UK (Russell) shed new light on the effect plants can have on the stress levels and productivity of office workers. Click here for a summary of their findings.

The overall conclusion of all these studies is that being around plants seems to reduce stress and engender a feeling of well being. The effect may be small and not apparent where the task being performed is especially complex, because the person is likely to be concentrating too hard to take in their surroundings. However, in situations where the task being performed is less complex, or even boring, the soothing effects of the plants are likely to be more noticeable. Careful thought therefore needs to be given to the location of plants in buildings if the greatest benefit is to be achieved. It’s also worth noting that the very fact that an employer has been prepared to spend money on something that has no obvious function, other than to make the workplace more attractive, may also be a contributing factor, by sending a signal to staff that management cares!  (See also the article about plants as a human resource strategy.)

All of the work relating to psychology and behaviour points to significant effects of plants, but does not provide explanations for the effects. It has been suggested that there is an evolutionary reason for human responses to vegetation. The argument goes something like this: throughout all but the last few hundred years of our existence on Earth, our lives have been inextricably linked with nature and our survival depended on nature. Now that we live and work in unnatural surroundings, we are deprived of contact with nature, which is inherently threatening. By bringing nature indoors, in the form of plants, we can rebuild the instinctive link between proximity to nature and survival. This is an attractive theory, but it needs to be tested. Other suggestions for the effect of plants relate to their shape and colour. Do the interesting shapes and textures relieve the tedium of a sterile environment and, if so, would replica plants have the same effect? Is green an especially stress-relieving colour? These questions would make for interesting studies in their own right.