Thuppal: Bring a plant indoors, benefit

So I had just spent the night writing the dullest paper I had written in a long time. I… So I had just spent the night writing the dullest paper I had written in a long time. I hadn’t gotten any sleep and barely had anything to show for it — I know you’ve been there too. I had just wasted an entire night’s worth of rest on a topic I never cared about.

But as I was about to accept my failure and walk dejectedly to class, I saw an unfamiliar sight outside my window that lifted my spirits. Over the course of the night, the tulips that my landlord planted in front of my apartment building had bloomed.

Ok, I’ll put it out there: I’m a guy and I like flowers — but not enough to write a column about them. Instead, I want to talk about why I felt better after looking out my window that morning.

Yes, the pretty colors were nice, but I think it was more about what had happened to the flowers. They grew, and they were part of something alive. They weren’t static like the concrete that surrounded them.

As we progress further into spring and start seeing the sun again, it gets so much harder to be satisfied with the fluorescent lights and bland walls of a classroom. But at the same time, we all know that trying to hold class or study outside usually leads to daydreaming and sleeping.

To me, it’s obvious why we like being outdoors and around plants. It’s that feeling of being close to something else that’s vibrant and alive; the smell of the grass and how it feels under your bare feet. It’s the same feeling I get when I go camping and have no cell phone reception    — being connected to nothing but what’s in front of me.

But this kind of pastoral fantasy is hard to come by in Oakland’s urban jungle, especially when most patches of grass are saturated with sunbathing students. What’s more, I’ll be stuck indoors for the next three weeks with finals just around the corner and summer classes starting soon after.

Ideally, I would like to keep my grades up while making sure I don’t spend the whole summer locked in my room staring at a physics textbook. So I figure I’ll bring the outdoors in.

I don’t really know which plants work best indoors so I suppose it’s something worthwhile to research. Multiple studies have shown that indoor plants greatly improve productivity and employee retention in the workplace. There are even companies dedicated to creating a balance between cubicles and plants.

And this kind of literally green décor is not reserved for the office. It’s something that everyone can do to improve the look and feel of his or her own indoor living space.

Plants have also been shown to improve morale when brought into the house, according to a study by LiveScience.com, a science news website. Because they can be associated with different places, ideas and people, plants allow us to take a break from our daily routines and focus on something other than work or school.

Right now, you’re probably thinking about why you would waste time and money on something that you can get for free outside. Even though that might be the case right now, the Pittsburgh summer will come and go before you know it. Indoor plants have benefits that last all year long. They’ve been shown to reduce stress and improve air quality. A joint study between NASA and the Associated Landscape Contractors of America found that plants improve indoor air quality by removing trace organic pollutants from the air.

They even have the potential to provide their caretakers with a taste of fresh produce. The people over at Windowfarms, a project addressing urban agriculture goals, have devised a way to create farms that’ll fit right in the confines of a window. By using cheap and accessible items like plastic bottles and rubber tubing, they’ve created a system that grows vegetables hydroponically, in mineral solutions and not soil.

It’s this kind of innovation that will allow us to keep our plants around even in the dead of winter. The colder months often induce seasonal affective disorder, given the general lack of light. But indoor plants could be a way of combating such problems.

The benefits and applications of having plants inside your house are numerous. It’s something we can take advantage of now and won’t have to let go of, even when the weather worsens. By exploring the possibilities of such an idea, we can hopefully find ways to make our lives a little less dreary.

Share your thoughts with Hay at hat23@pitt.edu.