It is another dark, rainy morning. You park your 2005 Ford Mondeo into its allotted space, a good fifty metres from the building. The left axle is still pulling slightly. You’ll have to get that checked out…
You trudge your way through the glass doors into the oppressive, humming yellow of the office fluorescents, a depressing din for your slow march up the stairs to your office, where you’ve worked the past 10 years. You wipe the wet off your coat and sit down with a sigh as the already stagnant air of the office fills your nose, guiding you to your 6×6…
On your desk sits your computer, your papers, your stationary; a shrine to perpetual boredom.
But peeking out, just to the left of that ever-present screen, is your plant. Spathiphyllum wallisii, more commonly known as the Peace Lilly, a gift from your aunt. You follow the deep green of its leaves, back to the stem, eyes going upward until you reach the delicate white flower adorning its top. Such a thing looks out of place here, too natural, too real.
Suddenly, today doesn’t seem so bad. You crack your knuckles, ready to begin…
Desk plants, while on the surface seem just like another novelty gift from Auntie Jan, something you’ll look at maybe once or twice then let die covered in dust like that Bob Ross Puzzle Set or ‘50 jokes about Ghosts to tell at Weddings’ book are in fact extremely useful in most office and tech-based workspaces.
Enriching a previously grey and dime-a-dozen office space with plants, or ‘biophilic design’, has been shown to increase productivity by 15%. ‘But how?’ I hear you cry, ‘Plants don’t do anything they just sit there looking green and boring!’ Well pull up a chair and I’ll tell you, alright? Alright, cool.
Firstly, plants are basically a natural reset button for our brains. Have you ever been toiling away at a job for so long that the more you do it, the more it pisses you off? And then the work becomes even harder because you’re all angry and then your computer starts to lag which is just perfect timing and you just wish you could go back to 30 minutes ago when everything wasn’t so hard?? Plants. Plants can help.
While they won’t zap your brain 30 minutes into the past (just yet, I’m talking to some people…), they have been proven to not only relieve stress but replenish our attention capacities. Checking out your desk plant like your crush just walked into the bar when stressed can effectively ‘reset’ your brain and help you continue working at a less frenzied demeanour than if you were still confined to a purely grey box.
Another positive for plants is that they basically become our friends. And I don’t want to hear any whinging and snide comments like ‘Heh, that’d never happen to me’ or ‘I don’t even need human friends, let alone a plant!’ like you’re some generic anime rival. Human beings are basically hot-wired to form attachments with inanimate objects by projecting our own emotional patterns of significance onto them. It’s known as Animism, and it’s literally been happening since the day we suddenly favoured one rock more than the other. Get over it. Having a desk plant is a mutual relationship, a friendship, no matter how you look at it. As you water the plant and become more comfortable with it, you’ll notice small details about it, such as plants aren’t even inanimate! They move quite a bit throughout the day, but just at such a slower speed than to our perception that they look still. To the plant, we probably look like a blur of constant energy, rushing about, doing jobs. Maybe it’s us who need to slow down, take a minute and relax with our friends, even if they are green. Even give them a name. It’d be polite.
Now, the most obvious thing you’ve probably heard about desk plants is that they purify the air. This…is not true. Sorry everyone, sorry. I know, I know. Stop your boo’s. Putting a plant on your desk is not suddenly going to feel like your inhaling the farts of Mother Nature herself (Editors Note: Corporate demanded this line or I was fired.). But plants give off the perception of having the air being purified, which is important as plants are shown to not only increase our happiness but our creativity. Plants provide intriguing stimuli that grab our attention and increase our creative output, so much so that it’s shown people want to spend longer in biophilic spaces.
The perception of plants is that just having them around makes us better, so what is stopping you from placing a little plant on your desk today?