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5 flowers for your garden that will boost your mood and calm your mind
It’s already a well known fact that surrounding yourself with flowers and plants, and spending time in gardens and green outdoor spaces can boost wellbeing, but how exactly can we reap the benefits when it comes to growing plants in our own garden and using flower arrangements?
Alexandra Noble, designer of the RHS Health & Wellbeing Garden at this year’s RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show, has created a garden that focuses specifically on creating an oasis of calm.
The garden, which is one of five in the brand new RHS Lifestyle Gardens category, features circular paths that promote meditation alongside aromatic herbs which fill the air with calming scent.
Alexandra shares her top choices of flowers that can boost the mood and settle the mind. Read on for her suggestions below:
1. Yarrow – Achillea millefolium (Yarrow)
Yarrow works wonderfully in both the garden and in flower arrangements. It stands well and its flat heads are a great contrast to other flower shapes. As the flowers age they blush pink around the edges and their solidity works particularly well with the billowy fronds of fennel or zingy clouds of Alchemilla mollis (Lady’s Mantle).
Yarrow is used as a sedative for anxiety and helps relieve high blood pressure.
2. Chives – Allium tuberosum
Chives look great planted along the edges of a border and their fluffy pom-pom heads making a great foil for other plants in arrangements. They also taste great and make a wonderful and extremely pretty garnish.
Chives can aid sleep and memory retention and also help with depression by blocking a chemical that inhibits the production of the ‘happy’ hormones, serotonin and dopamine.
3. Peony
From princesses to paupers, the peony is one of Britain’s most loved blooms. Beautifully mesmerising to behold, it also helps soothe our minds and heal our bodies with many parts of the plant having calming, cooling and sedating properties. The white peony is popular in Chinese medicine for easing anxiety and depression and is one of Chinese medicine’s oldest remedies.
4. Chamomile
This gentle and delicate flower is perfect for wildflower or ‘hedgerow’ style arrangements. It’s used for fighting anxiety and depression and acts as a mild sedative which calms nerves and reduces anxiety. Vapours from the flowers travel to the olfactory part of the brain which turns off tension and reduces the body’s stress response.
5. Rose
The national flower, the rose is a classic in any arrangement, whether it’s the plump, sumptuous heads of a cabbage rose, the spray of multi-stem varieties or as the classic single stem, they are without doubt one of the favourites. It is not just their beauty that earns them a place in this list though, as the scent of a rose is uplifting and has been proven to alleviate depression and anxiety.
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