1. Re-connecting People & Plants : Our Need for Nature

For my first blog I wanted to cover the topic of 'Connection' - because to me it's the most important thing of all. It's the the root of my passion for plants (not sorry for the plant pun) and the ethos behind the creation of Interior Landscapes.

People are going crazy for plants. Home design magazines are filled with them, architects are covering 50 storey buildings in them, councils are bringing in planning laws to ensure we have more plants in our streets, multinational corporations are filling their offices with them and doctors and psychologists are even prescribing exposure to nature! ! But behind the hype - what is it about plants & nature that is actually so valuable and why should we connect?

Nature is life

To answer this let's take a step back and look at the bigger picture. This need to “connect” with nature could more accurately be described as a “RE-connect” because connecting to nature is not a new thing. We as humans were once deeply connected with nature. We were once aware of the aliveness of the world because our survival depended on it. As hunters and gatherers; our homes, safety and food depended entirely on our ability to engage with the living environment around us - it wasn’t separate to our lives - outdoors vs. indoors - it was life - it was all we knew.

Nature moves “outdoors” (the disconnect)

Fast forward a few hundred thousand years. Humanity developed - and so too did our living arrangements. As our lives were civilised, colonised and radicalised, our understanding of nature also drastically changed. We started to view the world around us from the indoors rather than actually experiencing it. Grass was replaced with concrete and pure oxygen in our lungs replaced with controlled air conditioned environments. Nature was no longer essential to our everyday survival, it was now a concept, a novelty, rather than an experience, and certainly not an integral part of life. We viewed nature as a somewhat foreign place. It become wild and unsafe and unclean and unknown. So much so, that we now often forget that nature is even alive. You need only reflect on the terrible crimes we continue to commit against plants,animals and the land over the last few centuries.

Nature Deficit Disorder

Fast forward again to present day and the disconnect has never been more dramatic. Scientists have even gone as far to term this disconnection 'Nature-deficit Disorder' or NDD - (yes it's an actual thing!) which describes how all of us, especially children, are spending more time indoors, which can make us feel alienated from nature and perhaps more vulnerable to negative moods or reduced attention span. Richard Louv writes in ‘The Nature Principle’, that “the more high-tech our lives become, the more we need to be in nature in order to achieve balance.” This was first published in 2011 - and i’d say our lives are even more high-tech right now!

The Disconnect

It's no coincidence that the peak in our disconnection coincides with our peak in technologically driven lives. It’s not just kids, it's really our whole society that is constantly plugged in to technology and disconnected from nature and as a result rates of depression and anxiety and feelings of isolation have increased ten fold.

My parents generation spent their entire childhood outdoors. My mum would tell me how her parents would open up the kitchen door in the morning and say to her sisters and brothers “off you go - i don't want to see you till dinner time” and off they would, roaming through suburban countryside and exploring neighbours gardens till the sun set let them know it was time to head home. Sad to say, but I doubt my future children will be able to enjoy this sense of limitless freedom or technology free childhood. Nowadays it's more likely a child is living in an apartment than in a house with a garden, (let alone with open acres to wander through like my parents). The UN estimates that around approximately 54% of people worldwide now live in cities (that's up from 30% from the 1950’s) and its rising by millions each week.

A new equilibrium

BUT it’s not all doom and gloom... There is actually a great silver lining here. With our peak in disconnection comes a push for change. Sometimes things need to get really bad before we stop and question what we’re doing wrong. We are living in an unprecedented era of technology and we are still trying to work out how to find a balance. In the last 30 years or so we have seen a massive cultural shift to prioritising human connection with nature. There is a vast emerging library of research (link here so i don’t bore you) documenting the benefits of access to nature. Australia for example has multiple new planning guidelines aiming to increase our access to urban nature across our cities such as the ‘202020 Vision’ which aims to increase urban greenspace across Australia by 20% by 2020. Recent award winning architecture like the famous ‘One Central Park’ is literally dripping in greenery and city apartments with access to rooftop gardens or greenspace fetch higher real estate prices.We are starting to prioritse nature. New hospitals are being designed with ‘healing gardens’ that provide patients with access to nature and rooftop landscapes. This may sound like basic practice but this was a totally new way of thinking and designing and is reflective of a larger conscious movement. Hospitals were traditionally designed to be completely controlled with far of natural air flow. Even designing hospitals to now have more natural light is the result of research and designs that challenge the status quo and a realisation of our human need for nature. Designing hospitals with naturally circulating air is a huge breakthrough let alone new ones that provide access to healing outdoor or rooftop gardens.. Hospitals, Retirement villages, Residential communities, apartments, schools, homes, offices, interior design and shopping malls are all embracing this shift to incorporate nature into design. We as a society are acknowledging our need to connect - and there's actually a term for this too - its called ‘Biophilia’ and it's the belief that we humans are innately connected to nature. It says we don't just need it to physically survive but we need it for our mental wellbeing!

150 years ago, Frederick Law Olmsted (Designer of NYC’s Central Park) called it “a scientific fact” that nature “is favorable to the health and vigor of men.” (Cough.. and women!) Olmsted may of not have had the facts at the time to back this statement up (or understood gender equality) but he did know of our need to connect with nature - it’s taken a while but 150 years later we have finally woken up to it too.

It’s so important to know the WHY behind something, whether it be a movement you support, a design or a small business like this one. The ‘Why’ behind the nature/plant movement is wellbeing. Somewhere along the line we forgot that nature is an essential part of our human DNA - not only that, it is essential to our human wellbeing as a species.

How to

Now…. that’s all well and good I hear you saying.. But how does one actually reconnect? You don’t need to go off the grid, throw away your technology or write poetry to mother nature from a hut in the forest (or do because that would be epic) what you need to do is pretty simple. There are some specific techniques you can practice to re-connect with nature and take advantage of the wellbeing effects.

I've put together a simple easy to follow HOW TO in the next blog post… ‘HOW TO USE NATURE TO RECONNECT AND FIND YOUR ZEN’ aka. ‘Nature for Dummies’.

BLOG NO.2: 'How to Use Nature To Find Your Zen'