While many of us have lives that keep us stuck indoors. But with house plants, we can still bring some of the benefits of the outdoors to our indoor lives.
Welcome to this week's edition of Something Wild. I'm Rosemary Conroy for the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests.
Everyone knows the benefits of getting outdoors - fresh air, sunshine, and all the clean, cheap fun you can have hiking, biking or just puttering in your garden. It's unfortunate, then, that so many of us have lives that keep us stuck indoors so much.
Luckily, we can bring some of the benefits of the outside inside through the addition of house plants. Adding some leafy green plants to your decor, it turns out, is almost as good for you as adding some leafy green vegetables to your diet.
Plants have been shown to absorb toxic chemicals that have become all too common in our indoor air. If you work in a place with carpeting, upholstery and other synthetic materials, and/or copy machines, computer monitors and printers, the air you're breathing can be surprisingly compromised. You can give your lungs a break simply by putting an air-filtering philodendron on your desk.
Plants not only help absorb toxins given off by the accountrements of modern life, they also emit oxygen - which is a good thing if you breathe air. And they even absorb much of the carbon dioxide we exhale.
Plus, psychologically, indoor plants have been shown to make people feel better and stay calmer. For example, hospital patients heal faster when they can look out a window into a garden rather than onto a blank wall.
Now some people shy away from house plants cause they have done their share of planticide. A good way to start is to try matching the right type of plant to your home or office environment. If it's sunny and dry, you may do better with a cactus rather than a plant suited to living in the low light and high humidity of a rainforest.
There's tons of information on the internet to help you green up your thumb - and your life!
Something Wild is a joint production of the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, NHPR and the Audubon Society of New Hampshire. For Something Wild, I'm Rosemary Conroy.
