Fill Your Garden With Fragrance – Embrace the full sensory appeal of flowers in your garden, including the most evocative of all … fragrance!
Research on floral scents has highlighted their benefit to both mental and physical health by relieving stress and depression. If flowers alone do not lift your mood, online help is at hand at BetterHelp. However, if you are following a holistic route, scent can also improve memory, focus, and wellbeing, particularly in combination with other sensory engagement with plants and gardening activities.
By growing fragrant plants you can enjoy these benefits too, whether they’re looking for something rosy and relaxing, oriental and intoxicating, or fresh and invigorating.
Create scented displays that create the desired effect, such as the welcome fragrance of honeysuckle and roses around an entrance, the uplifting scent of lilies or lilac catching the breeze, or aromatic oils from Mediterranean herbs filling the air on a balmy summer’s evening.
For relaxation, the scent of lavender has been shown to lower blood pressure and heart rate to promote sleep, while aromatic rosemary keeps you alert, improving focus and memory. Sometimes a scent can even unlock a childhood memory, transporting you back to a time or place to help remember people and events in the past.
So, swap the scented candle displays this month and grow your own aromatherapy plants instead to fill your garden with fragrance the natural way. How satisfying is that?
DID YOU KNOW? The Fragrance Wheel was developed by the perfume industry to categorise different scents, giving them a descriptive language they can use. Fragrance directly changes our mood, too. Fruity and spicy perfumes are uplifting and reinvigorating, while floral and rosy perfumes reduce stress and anxiety, promoting mental balance. Fresh, green, herbal and citrus perfumes keep us mentally active and creative, while earthy scents can be comforting and nurturing.
Lilly Light