April 2018

Promoting the Power of Plants By Tim Hodson

Educating consumers about the many different benefits that plants provide is probably one of the easiest ways to get them to buy your products.

And a well-informed consumer is more likely to purchase even more of your products.

The National Initiative for Consumer Horticulture (NICH) wants to help you sell plants, so it has released a series of infographics that help explain how beneficial houseplants are.

NICH is a consortium of industry leaders who are promoting the benefits and value of horticulture. The group brings together academia, government, industry and nonprofits to cultivate the growth and development of a healthy world through landscapes, gardens and plants — indoors and out.

This new series of four #PlantsDoThatInside infographics focuses on the multitude of ways that plants affect where we live, where we work, where we heal and where we learn.

“Greening the great indoors is a way to help create sustainable indoor ecology and healthy minds and bodies,” says industry economist Charlie Hall, Ellison Chair, Texas A&M.

The 2018 NICH infographic series was developed from a scientific literature review evidence base developed Hall and his students.

WHERE WE LIVE AND LEARN

The infographics provide some powerful data that really reinforces what plants can do and how people can benefit from them.

The first NICH infographic focuses on the everyday benefits that indoor plants have to offer to homeowners. The Where We Live graphic shows:
• Rooms with plants have fewer pollutants like VOCs (volatile organic compounds).
• Plants in our homes increase room humidity by 10 percent.
• Plants remove up to 90 percent of formaldehyde in a room.
The second infographic on Where We Learn illustrates that classrooms with plants have many positive effects, including:
• Student test scores increase by 10 percent.
• Children are 7 percent healthier.
• Symptoms of attention deficit disorder (ADD) are reduced.

Two additional graphics explain how plants aid patients to heal faster and how they make employees more productive in the workplace.

The infographics were designed by Jennifer Gray, AmericanHort and Horticultural Research Institute. They are free and can be downloaded from NICH’s website www.consumerhort.org.

NICH is encouraging growers, retailers, teachers, extension agents and industry professionals to use the infographics for their promotional and educational materials and to upload them to social media.

The ambitious goal of the NICH consortium is “to increase the percentage of U.S. households participating in Consumer Horticulture to 90 percent by 2025” and this series of infographics is just one of the tools that you can use to get to that goal.