From Health to Happiness-The Amazing Power of Flowers
By Denice Rackley
“My heart found its home long ago in the beauty, mystery, order and disorder of the flowering”
Lady Bird Johnson
Wildflowers are more than just beautiful; they hold secrets to our health and happiness we are just beginning to understand.
When you pass a garden overflowing with a rainbow of blossoms or see a simple bouquet of wildflowers does your mood improve? If you answered yes, then you have felt the amazing power of flowers.
Native flowers feed wildlife, support pollinators that produce our food, and promote healthy ecosystems. But that’s not all, flowers have a psychological and physiological impact on our health.
Flowers have been used for herbal remedies for centuries. In North America, this vital knowledge concerning the medicinal properties of plants has been passed down orally in tribes and families over the last 150 years. Now scientific evidence backs up what the indigenous peoples knew.
Flowers are known to have antibacterial, antiviral, and antifungal properties. Wild flowers can ease inflammation, heal rashes, relieve sore muscles, stimulate the immune system, and help us relax.
Oils, ointments, and teas from flowering plants and flowers are no longer seen as odd, these herbal remedies are very becoming increasingly mainstream. Sunflower oil is used widely because of its low saturated fat levels, jasmine is known to sooth sore muscles, mint alleviates headaches and stomach ailments, and lavender is used in many beauty products and as a natural sleep aid.
Today, flowering plants provide almost 25% of the basic ingredients for our modern drugs. Scientists are continually learning more about the power of flowers.
Researchers have learned that flowers in hospital rooms speed recovery. Surgical patients with flowers in their rooms used less pain medications, had lower blood pressure and heart rates, were less anxious, and showed less fatigue. In addition, they were overall more positive during their stay than those without flowers in their room. These finding suggest “that plants in a hospital environment could be noninvasive, inexpensive, and an effective complementary medicine for patients recovering from surgery.”
Flowers in hospital rooms, and viewing nature in general, has been shown to lessen stress, promote the speed of postoperative recovery, and improve the quality of life during hospitalizations and while recovering.
If just looking at flowers can improve our health imagine what benefits there are in actually interacting with flowers. Gardening is a low stress outdoor activity that provides exercise and boosts mood.
A structured floral arrangement (SFA) program was designed for patients with neurocognitive disorders (decreased mental function due to a medical problem - Alzheimer, Parkinson’s, Multiple Sclerosis) to improve visuospatial memory. This study showed there are additional health benefits when patients and caregivers participate in flower arranging.
Patients were asked to arrange live flowers and foliage according to an instruction sheet, and then take the arrangements back home to enjoy with their family members and care staff. Arranging flowers improves the visuospatial memory of treated patients and enjoying the process of flower arranging encourages them to continue in cognitive therapy. Researchers also found the mental health of caregivers improved significantly, lessening their anxiety and insomnia. “The SFA program contributes to improving the mental health of caregivers as well as the visuospatial memory of patients with neurocognitive disorders.”
Contributing to our health is just the beginning, wildflowers also beneficially impact economies and the environment. Roadsides planted to native wildflowers provide travelers with beautiful scenery that encourages tourism, provides food for pollinators, regenerates soil, and makes roadways safer by capturing water and snow.
“Wildflowers break up driver monotony, which can contribute to clearer thinking and can reduce driver stress.”
All these benefits could happen by simply planting native wildflowers along the 17 million acres managed by departments of transportation. In addition, states would save thousands of dollars by decreasing the frequency of mowing and spraying roadways.
A 2009 - 2013 case study of highway I-10 in Madison County, Florida showed mowing could be decreased from seven times a year to only once, saving 1,000 dollars a mile. “The pilot study demonstrated that Florida Department of Transportation could experience cost savings as well as safety, aesthetic, and ecological benefits by implementing reduced mowing procedures.”
These studies go on to explain that native plants can be used in all types of roadside revegetation projects providing resiliency to weed invasions, reducing the need for herbicides, requiring less maintenance, showcasing a regions natural beauty, and supplying food and habit for pollinators.
The Handbook for Supporting Pollinators Through Roadside Maintenance and Landscape Design states that native flowers and grasses are perfect for planting along roadsides and in rest areas because they are best adapted to local growing conditions, tolerating heat and drought. Their root systems increase water inflation systems reducing runoff, and water pollution. Wildflowers also act as a snow fence trapping snow and preventing it from blowing across roads. Native plants reduce erosion, improve soil health, and support wildlife populations.
Invasive and non-native plants often outcompete native wildflowers for the nutrients and space required without the benefits that native species provide. Invasive plants and habit loss go hand in hand and are the leading cause of native biodiversity loss. “Invasive plant species spread quickly and can displace native plants, prevent native plant growth, and create monocultures.”
Changes in plant communities’ diversity always impact other species. “For example, the Fender’s blue butterfly depends on Kincaid’s lupine as a host plant for the butterfly larvae. Fender’s blue butterfly is listed as endangered and Kincaid’s lupine is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act due to habitat loss, changes in land use, and habitat encroachment by invasive species such as Himalayan blackberry and tall oatgrass.”
Wildflowers support our North American native pollinators, including more than 4,000 native bee species and 700 butterfly species. Because pollinators and native plants have evolved together, native plants are best suited to the environment and designed to meet the needs of pollinators.
Each flower species has a unique shape, size, fragrance, and color that attracts the pollinators it needs to produce seeds. Some flowers are long and slender, some are disc shaped, others hang down providing entry to specialized bees that have the unique size, shape, and behaviors needed to gain entry.
Some bees and butterflies are dependent on specific plant species to provide nesting material or to feed their young. Some bees line their nests with oils and resins collected from flowers that offers waterproofing and antimicrobial properties, which benefits the developing bees. Lamb’s ear (Stachys byzantine) and mullein (Verbascum spp) provide plant fuzz, called pubescence. Wool carder bees use the pubescence to line their nests located in hollow stems of last year’s flowers. Monarch butterflies only lay their eggs on Milkweed plants (Asclepias) and they young caterpillars only eat the leaves from these plants.
Providing pollinators the nectar and pollen they need ensures they will be able to maintain their populations which provide us with 1/3 of all the food we eat. According to the Xerces Society, animal pollinators are responsible for assisting more than 85% of the world’s flowering plants, including two thirds of the world’s crops. Pollinator.org breaks those percentages into numbers stating animal pollinators provide pollination services to over 180,000 different plant species and more than 1200 crops.
Wildflowers provide homes and habitat for pollinators and other wildlife, supporting entire ecosystems. They improve soil health, prevent erosion, and improve water quality. Roadsides planted to wildflowers not only support pollinator health, these native flowers cut down on the use of herbicides and fossil fuels saving states millions of dollars while increasing tourism. Wildflowers also contribute to our physical and mental health.
Unfortunately, many wildflower species have been lost to development and the spread of invasive plants which highlights the need for conservation of these valuable plants. Wildflower conservations organizations safeguard the future of wildflowers and wildflower habitats.
Lady Bird Johnson said, “Too often we have bartered away not only the land, but the very air and water. Too often we have sacrificed human values to commercial values under the bright guise of progress. And in our unconcern, we have let a crisis gather which threatens health and even life itself ... Today, environmental questions are matters for architects and laymans alike. They are questions, literally, of life and death. Can we have a building boom and beauty too? Must progress inevitably mean a shabbier environment? Must success spoil nature’s bounty? Insistently and with growing volume, citizens demand that we turn our building to a sensible, human purpose. They are asking, literally, for a breath of fresh air.”
Preserving wildflowers in our own gardens, along roadsides, or in our parks will enable these flowers to continue to provide food and homes for wildlife, enrich soils, clean the air and water, and enrich our lives with flower power.
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Here are several nation organizations that offer programs to support the planting and cultivation of wildflowers as well as regional and state groups if you would like join in the effort to protect and preserve wildflowers.
https://www.nativeplanttrust.org/
http://nenativeplants.uconn.edu/organizations.php
“Wildflowers are joy-giving. They have enriched my life and fed my soul and given beautiful memories to sustain me. Beyond their aesthetic value, there are other valid reasons for their increased use.” Lady Bird Johnson
