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Wellbeing Gardens & Biophilia
117 Plays4 years ago
In episode 50 of the Green & Healthy Places podcast I’m in the UK talking to Dr. Lauriane Chalmin-Pui, a Wellbeing Fellow at the Royal Horticultural Society - the UK’s leading gardening charity.
Lauriane completed her PHD at Sheffield University where she conducted research on how domestic gardens can support physical and mental health via exposure to plants and wildlife.
In our conversation we discuss wellbeing gardens, also known as healing gardens; planet-friendly gardening; environmental psychology as it relates to gardens; the emotional, physical and social benefits of gardening; the benefits for our microbiota of direct exposure to soil and earth, as well as her forthcoming research publication on the role a garden’s colours and scents can play in positive impacting human wellbeing.
GUEST / DR. LAURIANE CHALMIN-PUI
- https://www.rhs.org.uk/science/gardening-in-a-changing-world
- https://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/health-and-wellbeing/articles/greener-gardens-promote-healthier-residents
- https://www.rhs.org.uk/science/meet-the-team/environmental-horticulture-team/lauriane-chalmin-pui
HOST / MATT MORLEY
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Transcript
Introduction to Well-being and Sustainability
00:00:11
Speaker
Green and Healthy Places podcast, in which we explore the themes of wellbeing and sustainability in real estate and hospitality today. I'm your host, Matt Morley, founder of Biophilico Healthy Buildings, and in this episode, that's episode 50, Count Them People,
00:00:28
Speaker
I'm in the UK, talking to Dr.
Guest Introduction: Dr. Lorianne Charmin Puy
00:00:30
Speaker
Lorianne Charmin Puy, a wellbeing fellow at the Royal Horticultural Society. The RHS is the UK's leading gardening charity, if you don't know them. Lorianne completed her PhD at Sheffield University, where she conducted research on how domestic gardens can support physical and mental health via exposure to plants and
Gardening and Interior Design Synergy
00:00:50
Speaker
wildlife. So if you're a regular listener to the podcast,
00:00:52
Speaker
you'll get an angle of where a conversation might go connecting basically gardens with what we can do in terms of bringing the outside world in with biofilling design in buildings and interiors. Our discussion covers topics as diverse as well-being gardens also known as healing gardens. We look at planet friendly low environmental impact gardening
00:01:15
Speaker
environmental psychology as it relates to gardens, the emotional, physical and even social benefits of gardening and generally tending to plants, the benefits for our micro biota, that's our gut of direct exposure to soil and earth, as well as our forthcoming research publication on the role of gardens colors and scents.
00:01:36
Speaker
can play in creating a positive impact on human health and
What is Environmental Horticulture?
00:01:40
Speaker
well-being. This is a really interesting conversation. We go pretty deep, so enjoy it. Here is Dr. Lorien, chow Minh Pui.
00:01:50
Speaker
Lorianne, thank you so much for being here with us today. I'd really love to start with an initial question around just understanding the concept of environmental horticulture, which is your area of expertise. Could you give us a brief intro to that? Hi, Matt. Thanks a lot for having me. So I'm a postdoctoral fellow at the Royal Horticultural Society and the University of Sheffield.
00:02:16
Speaker
And I'm physically based in Wesley in the hilltop home of gardening science, and I'm in the environmental horticulture team. So we're primarily primarily concerned with improving our understanding of the interactions between soil plants, water and people. So this includes carbon, water and nutrient cycles for both outdoors and indoor plants. And
00:02:44
Speaker
how they're impacted by people, of course, as well as the impacts of gardens and gardening on human health and wellbeing. All of these functions are interconnected, and that's why the word environment. And of course, as I'm sure you'll know, it's all in the context of accelerated urbanisation and land use change, the biodiversity and climate crises.
00:03:10
Speaker
we're having more frequent extremes of temperatures and precipitation, which then has the knock on effects on climate, on the hydrological cycle, on biodiversity, on soil health. And our environmental horticulture team is composed of different specialists in these areas. So we've got horticultural scientists, the soil and climate change scientists, water scientists, and fellows like me on tree traits and ecosystem services, for example, and sustainability.
Sustainable Gardening Practices
00:03:39
Speaker
of course, research technicians as well. So our primary question in all of that is about the practical interventions that gardeners can apply to reduce their gardening footprint and then also improve environmental health and human wellbeing. It strikes me that there's a really interesting parallel between the work you're doing, which is very much academically driven
00:04:02
Speaker
around these outdoor spaces or indeed sort of an indoor garden and some of the principles that apply to my world in terms of creating greener and healthier buildings where we're constantly balancing those twin demands around
00:04:18
Speaker
what's our impact on the environment and the potential positive or indeed negative impacts on those people or the occupants of a building, those engaging with that space. So you mentioned climate change. I know it's not perhaps your specialism, but just this sort of very broad concept of sustainable gardening. How can gardening be anything but sustainable? What are the risks of gardening in terms of having a negative impact on the environment?
00:04:46
Speaker
Right. So I think in terms of a garden sustainability is very much about environmental resilience, whether that's indoors or outdoors. And there's many ways in which we can actually have a negative footprint, if you will. So if you're using peach based compost, for example, that is depleting peat bogs, which are a
00:05:14
Speaker
very important ecosystem and also a kind of carbon store. So it really depends on the practices. And there are so many different ways of garden, gardening, sorry. And in terms, when we think about surface area, we might think that all domestic gardens, for example, are quite, quite small and won't necessarily have a big impact. But about residential gardens comprise about 30% of Great Britain's total urban area.
00:05:44
Speaker
And I think it was there's about the total area of UK domestic gardens is about 700,000 hectares, which is equivalent to more than 90,000 football pitches. So it's quite a large area. And when we think, for example, so one positive thing that, for example, a gardener can do is to plant a tree in their garden or community or school or wherever. And
00:06:10
Speaker
If every gardener did plant that, we would be storing huge amounts of carbon. But one further thing to think about when we think about environmental horticulture, again, just to go back to that, is that we shouldn't necessarily just plant a certain tree because it sequesters more carbon, because we would lose diversity if we planted the same tree. And the goals of a garden are different to, for example, the goals of a woodland or an agricultural patch.
00:06:37
Speaker
We're operating on different timescales. So in a timber woodland, you might want to plant a tree that sequesters more carbon in that shorter timescale before it gets cut down. But in a garden, you're probably not anticipating to cut down your tree within the next 10 years. So you might want to choose a tree that encourages that slow growth in sequester's carbon over time and storing it in the tree. So there's, again, water practices.
00:07:02
Speaker
So whether you are irrigating your garden from mains water will be very different to if you are harvesting rainwater, creating permeable, as much permeable surface area and just different practices of how you water, how you feed your soil. There's definitely lots of scope that any gardener can do in their home. And for us at the RHS, how
00:07:31
Speaker
we can influence the horticultural industry, the government, and how we can promote these different, more sustainable behaviours. And then of course we have our own gardens that, you know, we have our own operations that are going in here. So we're also trying to improve that. Great, okay, so you've brought up a couple of things there. I think you had one point that just occurred to me as I was listening to you. It's very much the same principles when we look at, say, putting in a green roof on a
00:08:01
Speaker
on a building as part of a sustainable real estate plan. We're trying to achieve many of the same outputs that you've just described and also deal with many of the same issues around, for example, irrigation and how rainwater collection can just effectively reduce overall water consumption and lower irrigation systems and sherryscaping and things
Royal Horticultural Society's Mission
00:08:20
Speaker
like that. You mentioned the RHS and its role. So for those who are perhaps not familiar with it or anyone listening from outside of the UK,
00:08:28
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Royal Horticultural Society. What is the sort of overall aim? You're obviously a specialist in wellbeing within the sort of overall health and planetary aspect of the environmental horticulture team, but the RHS itself, how does your team fit into the wider picture and what are the aims and objectives of your teamwork over the course of a year? Right. So the Royal Horticultural Society is the UK's largest gardening charity.
00:08:58
Speaker
And so it's, it's all about that horticultural knowledge. So we have an advisory service members can call in and ask questions. It's about inspiring people to, you know, throw the best in their guidance. And it's about, um, promoting that horticultural industry as well. And.
00:09:22
Speaker
Within our team, it's very much the science, so the evidence base for all of this, the different initiatives. We've also got a community outreach team, for example, who work in areas that may not have that safe and quality access to green spaces. One of the campaigns at the moment is Planet Friendly,
00:09:48
Speaker
planet friendly gardening campaign. So this is exactly the kinds of things that we're talking about. And the aim of that is to help gardeners make the most of the physical and emotional benefits of gardening, both for the planet and for ourselves. What was the next part of your question? You mentioned, well, you've just tied them both in next, you mentioned the emotional benefits of gardening. And you also mentioned that the RHS has been working on some of its own gardens. And
00:10:17
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doing some research for our conversation I saw there. I think it was four of these sort of health and wellbeing gardens going up. So let's dig into that a little bit. So the emotional benefits from your evidence-based perspective, like how do you quantify those? How do you provide evidence for them? And what are the sort of broad buckets in terms of those emotional benefits? We're presumably talking more around sort of mental health and wellbeing.
Gardening's Mental and Social Benefits
00:10:45
Speaker
Yes, so there is a wealth of evidence on the mental, but also the physical and the social health benefits of gardens and gardening. And this is, it's a relatively new field in science that started picking up in the 80s in the field of environmental psychology. So there is, and it's been growing ever since, and I think the COVID pandemic won
00:11:13
Speaker
thing that it has alerted us, other than, of course, you know, medical infections, is the importance of green spaces. So I think it's really picked up. Most people now understand this, if you tell them about the mental health impacts of a garden, they're not going to look at you like you're crazy. So I think that it's really been building. But in the 80s, one of the first studies
00:11:37
Speaker
was by an environmental psychologist called Roger Ulrich. And he had a sort of natural experiment where he was looking at patients recovering from gallbladder surgery in a hospital. One wing of the hospital had a view of trees, the other wing of the hospital, the windows had a view of the brick wall and other buildings. And he saw that the people who were having rooms with a view of the trees were recovering
00:12:04
Speaker
a couple of days faster and being discharged a couple of days earlier than the patients with the view of the brick wall. They were requiring less painkillers and they were less grumpy with the nurses. So that was the real seminal study since then there have been theories that have been proposed. So the likes of attention restoration theory by Steven and Rachel Kaplan.
00:12:31
Speaker
stress reduction theory, which is developed by the same Roger Ulrich. And I started this research with my PhD in 2016. And really in these past five, six years, it's really grown a lot to the wealth of evidence on mental, physical and social health. So, for example, the things we can relook at are symptoms of depression, anxiety. So that's been shown to be reduced with gardening.
00:13:01
Speaker
You can also look at pleasant and unpleasant emotions and the frequency of them. You can look at mental health during the COVID lockdowns. For example, they've been quite extreme scenarios, but quite common scenarios now for many of us. We can look at general scales of wellbeing. We can look at reported stress.
00:13:27
Speaker
So that's a self-reported psychological perspective, but we can also look at physiological stress regulations. So one of my studies, for example, looked at cortisol, which is the body's main stress hormone. And I found that the presence of plants in small front gardens did actually have an impact on the residents
00:13:50
Speaker
cortisol patterns on the daily basis. So there's all sorts of things you can, there's also in terms of physical health, you can look at positive habits forming around diet and physical exercise. There've been studies showing that greener spaces are more likely to encourage active travel. So such as walking and bicycling, for example, gardening regularly also has been shown to reduce the risk of fracture. So like limb fractures and
00:14:19
Speaker
it's an adaptive form of physical exercise. So as one grows older and perhaps physical abilities change, it is an activity that one can keep up with as opposed to maybe running that is not as adaptive. And we're learning more and more about
00:14:40
Speaker
the importance of exposure to microbial diversity. So that's through soil and vegetation, small microbiota, very small organisms that are found on the skin and in our gut, depending on what we eat. And that will have a knock-on impact on our immune system. So very much physical health. And then finally, social health, which does often get forgotten, is linked to things like
00:15:06
Speaker
a sense of community, a sense of belonging in one's area, making friends, feeling connected with the world around us, and that will have knock-on impacts on our sense of self-esteem and creativity and having, you know, a kind of meaningful occupation to do. So there's lots of things, really, and it's only growing. Of course, each of these studies are done in particular contexts of particular populations, so there's always more to do.
00:15:38
Speaker
Thank you for that. It's so interesting to see the crossover, you know, that Ulrich study.
00:15:43
Speaker
which I think was in sort of the early eighties. And not that much seems to have been done since then, if I'm honest. Like we all go back to that one study of X number of patients in a hospital room, but even in the biophilic design space, it's really the seminal piece that we all refer to. And then again, into the sort of the ATR and the RSRT studies or concepts and theories. Biophilic design, what I'm seeing is that it has much more of a,
00:16:10
Speaker
passive component. I think what's coming through from what you've just said is there's this active piece and I think the key word there might be gardening rather than just exposure to plants and nature. So I often think about that in terms of forest bathing where there is an element of engagement with nature.
00:16:36
Speaker
and I think with gardening you're taking it a level further because you're then prompting exposure to the plants and therefore tapping into that sort of immune health microbiota and then that social piece around community and engagement is immediately suggesting that perhaps say like a rooftop garden in a residential building for example or an office even would have
00:17:04
Speaker
far more or perhaps a wider application in terms of the physical benefits than just bumping up the number of air purifying plants in reception, for example. I think it's a really striking piece of insight that perhaps biophilic design
00:17:25
Speaker
Yeah, maybe struggles to get to because it tends to be more about introducing these elements into a space and then accepting that people will just sort of passively take in their surroundings and hope for the best. Gardening is much more about engaging with the garden and playing an active role in it. Clearly that's the main difference, right?
00:17:47
Speaker
Right, so those two, the active and the passive engagement of the plants, you're absolutely right to draw those two as key differences. And of course, when you are gardening, you do have that added element of creativity of being able to shape the environment that's around you, which psychologically is very linked to a feeling of control. And when we look at how that might be impacting, I mean, often a lot of the
00:18:17
Speaker
Ils that we have are often around uncertainty and lack of control. So when someone can control something that will usually have quite a lot of benefits. However, I do disagree with you that the more passive exposure to plants doesn't have much impact and that it is kind of negligible because there are more and more studies and including one of my own that even just that that passive exposure of
00:18:46
Speaker
having something nearby. So whether that's in an office or in a home or just outside of the home, that very frequent access does have an impact on perceived stress, on perceived wellbeing, but also on the cortisol patterns, which I mentioned earlier.
Impact of Passive Plant Exposure
00:19:03
Speaker
So I did a study that we found a whole street that garden, they had front gardens, so the physical space between the house and the street.
00:19:15
Speaker
or front yards if you're in North America, that were previously paved over. And so I did an intervention where I added plants to them. And I studied the residents there over the course of a year. And we found that before the intervention, only 24% of the residents had this healthy diurnal cortisol pattern. So a healthy physiological stress regulation. And then after we added the plants, this increased to 53%, suggesting that
00:19:45
Speaker
those individuals had better physiological stress regulation in their bodies, which probably had a link to their mental health. That was your four year research project with the University of Sheffield. Is that the one? Yes, exactly. And most of those people were not actively taking care. So they were two planters with some ornamental plants in them. They were self-watering containers. So there was a store of water.
00:20:14
Speaker
underneath. So the participants barely even had to water them. It was in Salford where it rains a lot. For the vast majority of these people, there was no real active gardening engagement, but they still got those benefits. And you went with ornamental plants. So what were the specifics of that? Were you looking for colour? Do you think you obviously went for what you would imagine would create the most
00:20:40
Speaker
positive benefits, right? So is that about aesthetics? Is it about painting the rainbow with the flowers and the plants that are out there? Or what suggestions would you have in terms of trying to
00:20:51
Speaker
Bring a little bit of that in. Sure. So interestingly, in that experiment, I didn't go for what I thought would have the most benefits. I wanted to isolate as many factors as possible. So when you're doing a science experiment, I didn't want to kind of conflate. I didn't want to put food, for example, because then it could be argued that the people were having a higher well-being because they were deriving other benefits, maybe having a cheaper food bill if they were getting
00:21:15
Speaker
some harvests from it. I didn't want to go for anything too aromatic that might lift up spirits in other ways. I wanted to go for something not too exotic either that would provide a huge novelty factor, for example. I wanted to go with plants that are quite normal, so all found in regular garden centers.
00:21:45
Speaker
and quite familiar to people. So we had a mix of some bedding plants, some shrubs, some climbers. And the focus also was, of course, the climatic conditions of, of sulfurage, but something that was easy to know maintenance in that self-watering container. But yeah, I mean,
00:22:07
Speaker
We did go for something. So we went for a kind of purple palette. We had asked for, we had asked the residents beforehand if they had anything they particularly didn't want. But then beyond that, they were happy to go with anything. So there were violas, petunias, azaleas, acclimatists, then spring bulbs, so daffodils.
00:22:31
Speaker
snowdrops and crocuses. Yeah, so quite a familiar range of plants. And I know you recently were involved in, well played a sort of seminal role in the health and horticulture conference of 2022 and your particular presentation there was around research and community. So were those two
00:22:51
Speaker
researcher community, the city and the street. So were you there talking about that subject and have you evolved your thinking since the end of the research project? So what were the sort of key messages you were communicating there to the audience? Yeah, so the RHS Health and Horticulture Conference that was on the 17th and 18th of March was very much part of my own research agenda where going beyond the
00:23:21
Speaker
actual logistics of the research itself, we really do want to play that role in bringing people together. So one of the things we've found is that the horticulture industry itself doesn't necessarily fully recognize these health and wellbeing impacts and the evidence base for it. And the health and social care sector as wide as I can cast that net doesn't necessarily have
00:23:46
Speaker
skills and understandings to really have that win-win effect and then of course around and associated to that you've got professionals in urban planning and in the built environment like yourself and there is so much more so really what we wanted to do was bring people together and share that knowledge and my own talk as part of that was yeah so titled research and community and that was really to tie in the importance
00:24:15
Speaker
of people in the development and the application of that research. So how can we achieve the integration between science and and I mean to call it outreach but knowledge, dissemination and sharing and what I meant by the city and the street level was because it refers to the scale at which physical, mental and social health often operates
00:24:38
Speaker
for individuals and for communities, especially when we're thinking about green cultivated spaces and domestic gardens.
Gardens as Public Health Assets
00:24:46
Speaker
So for the average individual, their wellbeing will be based on, to a certain extent, their genetics and their lifestyle and things like that. Of course, their family, their friends, but then in terms of a spatial scale, it will be the city and the street, their home, their workplace, their school.
00:25:08
Speaker
And the aim of the conference altogether is to improve the recognition of gardens and gardening as a valuable public health asset and as a resource that can contribute to
00:25:24
Speaker
promoting better health for everyone but also reducing that incidence of poor health for a generally well, seemingly well population as well as for specific groups of people who might need more targeted interventions or more specific supports to access safe green spaces.
00:25:45
Speaker
And from the outputs of the conference then, but also based on your own knowledge, when one thinks of say, healing gardens in cancer care homes, for example, like in the Maggie's care centers where they create gardens that are intended to be spaces for cancer patients to on some emotional level to heal. Is there a playbook emerging in terms of
00:26:10
Speaker
the way to maximise a space to get the most out of it from a scientific perspective in terms of those mental wellbeing, mental and physical benefits. Are there key principles that are starting to become clear or is that still a sort of work in progress? From the design element, I'd really recommend the work and the book of Claire Cooper Marcus, who has looked at therapeutic garden design and
00:26:39
Speaker
She has based a lot of her findings on post occupancy evaluations. And it's really wonderful. She not only looks at the impacts on patients and their visitors, but also quite importantly on the staff who are working at the hospitals who often do have quite tough frontline jobs. Again, we've seen that even more with the pandemic.
00:27:07
Speaker
But actually, there's not yet any scientific evidence base. So I have a PhD student who's just been starting out doing a scoping review for exactly what you're saying. And looking at the scientific literature, she's not really found much that has any kind of quantitative
00:27:29
Speaker
evaluation of this. So it's all quite qualitative, subject to the designs, of course, in very different contexts, it can be relatively straightforward, I think, to spot a bad design. So something that just isn't used by people, you might have a garden space that, you know, has metal benches in a hot climate. So of course, nobody's going to sit there, that's very easy to pinpoint. But then in terms of really
00:27:59
Speaker
leveraging and optimizing what we do know that scientific approach isn't there yet and that is the case for these kind of hard features let's say but also for plants so the role of scent of color of symmetry for example and often in when you're looking at planting design handbooks there isn't there's often an approach that's based on choosing the plants for
00:28:23
Speaker
for their function, for the wider ecosystem. And then the last thing is kind of aesthetics and sensory properties. And of course, all three of them are very important. But that last point is generally just completely subjective and based on personal taste of either the garden designer or if they've done a sort of consultation focus group with the future and potential users of the place. But there's not yet that scientific approach.
00:28:52
Speaker
that's what we'd really like to get to. One of our goals at the RHS is to create an evidence-based blueprint for wellbeing gardens, whether that is in a hospital context or a residential context, the school context, the prison context. There's a kind of model to go on that is based on scientific evidence. Which would then be so useful for
00:29:16
Speaker
various other sectors, including my own.
Effects of Color and Scent in Gardens
00:29:19
Speaker
That's what's, I think, so powerful about the work that you're doing, is that it can then be leveraged in other sectors too, because it has a sort of spillover effect. You mentioned color and scent. I know you've been doing your own research on that. It might be too early to speculate on the outcomes of it. But what's your initial hypothesis in terms of the role of color and scent on stress and well-being from a garden context?
00:29:44
Speaker
Yeah, so I've started doing some indoor experiments and we'll be doing outdoor ones as well to kind of have a multi-pronged approach to understanding this. Essentially what we've got outdoor, for example, in the RHS Whizzly Garden in Surrey, we've got a well-being garden, which has been designed by Matt Keatley as a living laboratory. So it's got these different features. There is an area of
00:30:12
Speaker
running water, for example, there's an area of still water, there's an area of plants and flowers that are deeper reds and oranges, and then an area that has more whites, pale pinks, pale yellows. So the wellbeing garden there is, as I said, not based on any scientific conclusions, but it's based on scientific hypotheses. And then it gives us the space to test them out.
00:30:41
Speaker
So one of the hypotheses, for example, is the impact of color on our emotional responses to different colors. So in psychology and marketing, we know, for example, that the color red can evoke certain different emotional responses. So be that power or anger or love. And often these kinds of things will be mediated, of course, by cultural and individual idiosyncratic
00:31:10
Speaker
experiences that there's no research so far on whether those colour stimuli, whether they have the same emotional responses when they're in a natural setting, in a garden, on a plant. And so one of the hypotheses following that psychological theory is that the reds and the warmer colours
00:31:37
Speaker
might be more arousing in terms of arousing emotions. So they're the more active emotions, like excitement and invigoration and anger as well is an arousing emotion. And then when we look at the cooler colors, so the whites, the pastels, the blues, whether they would be more calming. And of course, I think often when we think of a wellbeing garden,
00:32:06
Speaker
or a therapeutic garden or a healing garden or whatever you want to call it. I think most people automatically think of relaxation and lower stress but actually that's not necessarily what we need as humans. We don't want to just be relaxed all the time and guidance can be a place for us to
00:32:26
Speaker
experience our full range of human emotions. So sometimes we want to be really stimulated. And so that's part of the design and whether that's through color that I've been talking about or scents. So we know that scents like rosemary, for example, there have been tests on rosemary essential oil, that that has increased alertness and cognitive attention. So, you know, if you do a little
00:32:52
Speaker
kind of little cognitive tests people have scored higher when they've had some rosemary essential oil next to them versus without. So there are so many ways in which the planting pallets of a garden can influence and if you've got a space that can be, for example, divided into two areas very crudely,
00:33:13
Speaker
you can have one that is less arousing, one that is more arousing. And depending on how you as an individual are feeling that day, you can go and surround yourself in an environment that suits what you need, what you want, how you're feeling, and that will help you regulate your emotions in a healthy way rather than suppressing anything. Well, if you can get to it, that type of insight would help
00:33:43
Speaker
Anyone working in the biophilic design field to say create, know how to adapt the interiors in a space, for example, an office environment where perhaps it is more about cognitive performance and alertness and concentration productivity versus say a quiet room space within a large office, which was more about the yin to that yang. So then about calming and restorative because I think it, yeah, we just don't have the scientific
00:34:13
Speaker
basis for that. I think we're often doing it more on instinct. And I was going to close, if I may, by a question on that. Rather, perhaps less instinct, more on an angle around evolutionary psychology. I just wondered, from your perspective, which is clearly science-based, is there any room for an evolutionary psychology approach that says, well, perhaps some of what we're dealing with here is about
00:34:39
Speaker
as much as anything, our genes, our history, our evolution on the planet in tune and connected with nature. Is there space for that or are you looking for hard facts only in the present day? Really interesting question. So I think that at the end of the day, we are all the same species with animals. You know, we have our habitat. Our habitat is increasingly for most people in the world.
00:35:09
Speaker
urban, and I don't personally kind of understand the very big dichotomy between urban man-made environments and nature, and especially these are often contrasted. But I think that what's important and what we as a kind of modern day human need is the balance and the integration of those two things.
00:35:37
Speaker
I think that often there can be a very easy over attribution to these evolutionary arguments that today we are much more mediated by our cultural experiences, whether that is nationality or race or gender or just past experiences that we've had as individuals. And I think that for most people that will
00:36:07
Speaker
probably be the more important when we think about emotional reactions that often will kind of override any evolutionary aspects. But I think that we certainly at the basic level, yes, we are drawn to nature, but the question is which kind of nature and a tree is something that is very understandably nature.
00:36:38
Speaker
a virus or pathogen less so. So I think, you know, sometimes we've got to, we've got to really understand what we're talking about. And sometimes it can be over generalized. So yeah, I mean, I think there is definitely an importance for that, for that science of understanding what it is and what reactions are we finding. And the, the argument isn't, it doesn't always just go back to, you know, where did we evolve?
00:37:07
Speaker
I think that's critical. It's too much of an umbrella concept to just say, well, nature dominates nurture. So it's not about what we've learned, but it's about what we were born with in our DNA. And therefore, biophilia is already proven and we don't need to back it up. I think we need both. We need an understanding of the science that's proving that it's still present today and that we are in fact reacting as
00:37:33
Speaker
perhaps an evolutionary approach might suggest we need to yeah definitely and I think we also need to understand our impact on nature so things like sustainable practices environmental pro-environmental behavior things like that I mean they may sound quite small in the grand scheme of things when you look at you know the huge tipping points of climate change and things like that but ultimately
00:38:00
Speaker
that integration, however much nature there is in your environment, you're still depending on the water, you're still depending on the air, you're still depending on climate stability.
Interconnectedness of Horticulture and Health
00:38:09
Speaker
And we do need to understand our impacts on that and how it all ties in. And I think that's how just to go full circle back to the kind of environmental horticulture, it's not
00:38:20
Speaker
It's not just our wellbeing versus a planetary, natural, very green planet everywhere. It's really about everything coming together and everything is interlinked and equally important.
00:38:36
Speaker
I think we should close on that. That's a big thought to wrap things up with. Thank you so much. We'll leave a note. We'll leave a mention of the Wellbeing Garden Book by your colleague at the RHS, Professor Griffiths, in the show notes. In terms of people connecting, showing support for the RHS, how can they follow along with the work that you're doing there?
00:38:56
Speaker
Well, we've got a, oh, I can't remember the URL. You might have to link it, but we've got plenty of pages on our website that has links to all of this wellbeing research. People of course can contact me directly if there is a specific question or access to a specific paper or study. In terms of
00:39:21
Speaker
more generally gardening inspiration for, for example, small spaces, things like that. The rest of the RHS website also has plenty of horticultural knowledge that is freely available. You don't have to be in the UK, but of course it is probably more biased towards UK plants. And in terms of sustainable gardening practices, again, there's a wealth of
00:39:50
Speaker
tips and advice on the RHS website. Wonderful. We'll add all the links in the show notes. Thanks again for your time. Thank you.