Flowers, plants, and mental health — what actually helps in a Singapore home

There’s a lot of feel-good content on the internet about how flowers boost your mood. Most of it is too sweeping to be useful, and most of it was written for temperate-zone homes where the relationship between greenery and indoor wellbeing is meaningfully different from ours. This post is for the Singapore reader who’s wondering whether flowers and plants in the home actually do anything for mental health, what specifically tends to help, and which of the four kinds of subscription we offer is the most helpful for the wellbeing angle. The honest answer is: yes, they help, but probably not in the ways most articles suggest.

What the research actually says

The research on flowers, plants, and mental health is real but narrower than the marketing tends to claim. The strongest findings cluster around a few specific effects:

• Reduction of stress during acutely stressful situations in both healthcare clinics and office environment. Adding flowers or plants to an environment leads to the improvement of self-reported levels of stress among people in hospitals and offices. Such reduction is more vivid when the place lacks any plants before flowers were added.
• Improvement in task performance in presence of plants nearby. Those employees who have plants near their workplace tend to work with increased concentration compared to those who have no plants in front of their eyes; however, plants should look healthy and not stressed themselves.
• The faster restoration of physiological parameters after experiencing stress with flowers around. Just being in presence of flowers helps to restore blood pressure and pulse to normal state after being exposed to any stress-related experience. This finding is repeatedly confirmed by different authors.
• Small increase of self-reported life satisfaction in households using fresh flowers regularly. Those families which use fresh flowers in their homes report greater levels of satisfaction in their lives compared to control ones. “Small” here means that there are still problems, and flowers will not solve any of them.

Things not proved to be true by the available literature on this issue: curing depression with flowers, flowers as a substitute of medical treatment, and influence of certain colours on physiological parameters. There is no scientific evidence backing up the so-called chromotherapy – healing using flowers of certain colours. Yellow flowers make us happier; lavender flowers alleviate anxiety. That is simply not true. However, it feels good to be surrounded by your favourite colours.

Why Singapore homes get a different version of this benefit

Most of the studies on flower/ plant and well-being have been done in temperate homes – northern American or European flats with seasonal access to outdoor nature, gardens, and parks. In such environments, flowers indoors help fill the gaps created by lack of contact with nature outdoors. The case is not so in Singapore where the proximity of outdoor nature is higher than most major cities in the world. The Botanical Garden, the Park Connector Network, even our HDB neighborhoods with their beautifully landscaped void decks – there is very little outdoor nature that is more than ten minutes’ walk from any home.

What does this mean in practice? It means that the well-being impact of flowers and plants indoors in Singapore will be highest on individuals who live close to outdoor nature but do not visit it regularly. Individuals who leave their house before sunrise and come back at dusk, people who have to stay at home because they take care of another person, individuals undergoing prolonged treatment, elderly subscribers in their 70s and 80s who no longer visit gardens due to decreased mobility.

For individuals who spend hours hiking through MacRitchie on weekends, a single phalaenopsis flower placed on the dining table will be less likely to affect their well-being. For the ones whose routine is office, MRT, home, and repeat, it could be more significant.

Which subscription type does what

We offer four subscription types and they each map to a different mental health benefit. Honest framing for each:

Live plants — the steady, daily background effect

Among all four products, living plants have the most substantial research basis regarding the health benefits of continuous use. This product functions based on biophilic design, which means that people have evolved within natural settings with greenery, and the lack of greenery causes a mild form of stress reaction in modern buildings that goes unnoticed by the subconscious mind. By incorporating living plants into the indoor environment, this stress reaction is reduced daily without any conscious effort for as long as the plants remain within the environment.

In the case of Singapore, which relies heavily on air-conditioning systems, this product is also the only one that requires species selection based on its effectiveness within that specific climate condition. Plants that do not thrive within the conditions will reduce any possible health benefit from being present. There are studies that have shown how visibly unhealthy plants may cause negative psychological impacts such as mild guilt and anxiety among the owners. Our live plant subscription selects species specifically tested in Singapore aircon and replaces any plant that struggles.

Phalaenopsis orchids — for chronic stress, low-energy weeks

Attention must be paid to cut flowers. They need to be delivered, organized, watered, changed out when they wilt. In the case of an individual in an aspect of life with reduced mental capacity—parent of a new child, caregiver, patient in ongoing therapy, individual dealing with depression—the extra pressure of cut flower upkeep becomes one of many sources of anxiety.

This is part of the rationale behind Phalaenopsis subscriptions. The flowers come in bloom and need little care for six to eight weeks after which they are picked up and disposed of without a chance to droop. The psychological benefits are clear, the maintenance costs negligible, and the flowers never have a chance to wilt under someone already burdened. Our phalaenopsis subscription is the one we most often recommend to subscribers buying for a friend going through a hard time.

Loose stalk arranging — the active, ritual benefit

If the plant subscription delivers a passive background benefit, loose stalk arranging delivers an active foreground one. The act of trimming stems, choosing where each goes, building something that wasn’t there twenty minutes ago — this is a concrete cognitive benefit researchers call “flow.” Activities that produce flow are correlated with better mental wellbeing across study populations, and floral arranging is one of the few flow activities that fits in 15 minutes, requires no special equipment, and delivers a visible, gratifying result every single time.

Subscribers tell us the arranging is the most peaceful part of their week. Several have specifically described it as the closest they get to meditation in a normal week. Our loose stalk subscription delivers conditioned stems with an arrangement guide tailored to that week’s blooms — designed for people who genuinely enjoy the doing.

Arranged vases — the simple, no-friction lift

Scheduled arrangements provide the weakest mental health impact among the four options, yet are the most readily available. There is no need to care for your purchase after receiving it, learn how to use it properly, or commit any further effort once the vase is set up. This option will give you the steady psychological boost of entering a space with something new and vibrant in sight, even if you weren’t thinking about it beforehand.
We wouldn’t recommend opting for this arrangement if your sole purpose was improving your mental health, although such an outcome is guaranteed – but rather would suggest that, if you’ve decided to get a subscription with wellbeing benefits in mind, one of the remaining three options would probably suit you better.

What doesn’t work as well as people claim

Some honesty about the things wellness content tends to oversell:

A small honest closing

Flowers and plants at home are not therapy. They are not a cure. They are something tiny, steady, and genuinely good that makes an impact over time. And there are times in our lives when tiny and good things mean more to us than other times. If you are in such a period in your life — or you are looking for a gift for someone who is in one — then the effect on mental health is real, but choose the subscription according to what is needed. If you want to discuss which subscription will be best for you, just text us on WhatsApp; Wendy reads all the messages we receive. Or, if you simply want to see how subscriptions work, here’s the how the subscription works page.