Flowers are beautiful. But we think there is more to them than that.
Let us say the honest thing first, though, because it shapes everything that follows: we don't believe flowers are a cure. A floral workshop is not automatically therapy. What we do believe is that working with flowers can create opportunities for wellbeing — and that those opportunities are worth taking seriously, designing carefully, and looking at honestly.
At Hello Flowers!, we have always believed that flowers can do more than brighten a room. They give us something to look at, something to touch, something to make and, often, something to give to another person.
This is part of why we are interested in therapeutic horticulture — the use of plants, gardening and nature-based activities to support wellbeing, participation and connection.
While arranging flowers is not the same as gardening, many of the same principles are present: working with natural materials, engaging our senses, making choices, creating something, and caring for something outside of ourselves.
And there is growing research behind this.
Flowers and positive emotion
A study by psychologist Jeannette Haviland-Jones and colleagues at Rutgers University looked specifically at the effects of flowers on people's emotions and social behaviour. Across three studies, flowers were associated with immediate positive emotional responses, more positive mood reported days later, and increased social behaviour towards others.
It is worth being upfront about the study's limits. The research was conducted in cooperation with the Society of American Florists, the samples were relatively small, and the first of the three studies involved women only. We think the findings are interesting and consistent with what we observe — but we would not want to present them as more settled than they are.
What we take from it is not that flowers make people happy in some mechanical way. It is that flowers are not simply something we look at. They can become part of how we connect with one another.
We give flowers to say congratulations, thank you, I'm thinking of you, welcome, or I'm sorry. In many of life's important moments, flowers help us express something when words aren't quite enough.
Working with flowers engages us
There is also something about the act of making.
When we arrange flowers, we have to slow down enough to notice what is in front of us.
Which flower do I like?
Where should it go?
What happens if I move it?
How do these different shapes and colours work together?
Research into aesthetic experience gives us a partial account of what might be happening. Ishizu and Zeki, working at University College London, scanned participants while they viewed images and listened to music they had rated as beautiful, indifferent or ugly. Across both senses, a single region — the medial orbito-frontal cortex, an area associated with reward and emotional value — was consistently active during the experience of beauty, and more strongly so the more intensely beautiful the experience was rated.
We hold that finding lightly. Brain imaging tells us where something registers, not what it means for a person's day. But it does suggest that perceiving something as beautiful is not a passive event. Something is engaged.
Which matches what we notice in our workshops. We don't need to tell someone to “be mindful” while they are arranging flowers. We can simply give them flowers to work with. The attention comes through the activity.
There is a long human history with flowers
Our relationship with flowers is also much older than we sometimes realise.
At Raqefet Cave on Mount Carmel in Israel, archaeologists found the impressions of flowering plants — sage and other aromatic species — deliberately laid to line four graves between roughly 13,700 and 11,700 years ago. The research team, led by Dani Nadel, describe this as the earliest direct evidence currently known of flowers being used to prepare and decorate graves.
Someone gathered those stems. Someone chose them, carried them into a cave, and arranged them beneath a body. Nearly fourteen thousand years later, we are still doing a version of the same thing.
Flowers have long been part of how humans mark important moments — celebration, remembrance, transition and loss. Perhaps this helps explain why they continue to carry so much meaning today.
What does therapeutic horticulture tell us?
The wider evidence around horticultural therapy and therapeutic horticulture is encouraging.
A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis by Wood, Barton and Wicks pooled results from social and therapeutic horticulture programmes and found significant reductions in symptoms of depression and anxiety. Broader reviews have also reported associations with improved psychological wellbeing, reduced stress, better quality of life and stronger social outcomes.
But the same reviewers are consistent on one point: study designs vary considerably, risk of bias is often moderate, and larger, better-controlled trials are needed before strong causal claims can be made.
We would rather stand on evidence that is honestly described than on claims that are easy to sell. But we also don't think a gap is the same as a dead end.
Most of this research looks at gardening, growing and green space. Very little of it looks specifically at flowers as the medium — at what happens in a single session, indoors, with cut stems, where there is no soil, no waiting, and no growing season to see through. That is a narrower question, and it is an answerable one. It needs programmes designed with outcomes in mind from the start, consistent measures used before and after, and practitioners willing to publish what they find rather than only what flatters them.
This is the work we want to be part of. Our therapeutic floral workshops are built with evaluation embedded — growth journals, pre- and post-session measures, structured feedback — not because it makes for good marketing, but because the field will only get better evidence if practitioners help generate it.
So we come back to where we started. Flowers are not a cure. A workshop is not therapy. But the experience of working with flowers can create opportunities.
Opportunities to pause.
To make something.
To try something new.
To care for something.
To connect with another person.
And to contribute.
The flowers are not the whole of it
There is one more thing we want to be clear about, because it is easy to miss.
The flowers alone are not what does the work.
The American Horticultural Therapy Association's definition of therapeutic horticulture makes this explicit: the activity is facilitated by someone with training in the use of horticulture as a therapeutic modality, and it takes place within a programme that has goals. What distinguishes therapeutic horticulture from a gardening group is not the plants — it is that the focus is on the people rather than only on the task.
The same applies to flowers. Put a table of stems in front of a group with no thought given to how the session is held, and you have a nice afternoon. That is genuinely worth something, and we are not dismissive of it. But it is not the same thing.
A trained facilitator does work that is largely invisible when it is done well. They set up the space so that people can take a risk without feeling exposed. They pace the session so that no one is rushed and no one is left waiting. They notice who has gone quiet. They frame the activity so that there is no wrong arrangement, which is what allows people to make choices freely in the first place. And, crucially, they process the experience afterwards — helping people put words to what happened, connect it to their own situation, and take something away that outlasts the flowers.
That last part matters especially in the settings we work in. For a caregiver who has not made anything for themselves in months, the arrangement is not the point. What it surfaces is the point. Someone needs to be able to hold that when it comes up.
This is also where our own background sits. Hello Flowers! grew out of social work practice, not only floristry. We think the facilitation is not a wrapper around the activity. It is part of the intervention.
What this looks like in a room
Some of this is easier to see than to argue.
In our therapeutic floristry sessions, we work with people who are carrying a great deal — caregivers, people living with or beyond illness, neighbours who may not know each other yet. We put flowers on the table, and something shifts in the room.
People who arrive tired begin by handling the stems before they say much at all. Conversation tends to start sideways, over the materials, rather than head-on. Someone reaches across to pass a flower to the person beside them. Someone else spends a long time on a single placement and then, unprompted, explains who they are making it for.
Very little of that is instructed. Most of it is what the flowers make possible.
Why we do what we do
This is what we are interested in at Hello Flowers!.
Not simply selling flowers, but creating experiences around them.
A bouquet can be a gift. A workshop can be a creative break. A community activity can become a reason for neighbours to meet. And working with flowers can give someone an opportunity to make, care and share.
Flowers are our medium — but the medium is only half of it. The other half is how the space is held. What we are really cultivating is connection, creativity, care and a sense of participation.
And perhaps that is why flowers have stayed with us for so long.
If you would like to bring a session to your team, your community or yourself, you can see how our workshops work or read more about the community work these sessions help fund.
References
- Haviland-Jones, J., Rosario, H. H., Wilson, P., & McGuire, T. R. (2005). An environmental approach to positive emotion: Flowers. Evolutionary Psychology, 3(1), 104–132. https://doi.org/10.1177/147470490500300109
- Ishizu, T., & Zeki, S. (2011). Toward a brain-based theory of beauty. PLoS ONE, 6(7), e21852. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0021852
- Nadel, D., Danin, A., Power, R. C., Rosen, A. M., Bocquentin, F., Tsatskin, A., Rosenberg, D., Yeshurun, R., Weissbrod, L., Rebollo, N. R., Barzilai, O., & Boaretto, E. (2013). Earliest floral grave lining from 13,700–11,700-y-old Natufian burials at Raqefet Cave, Mt. Carmel, Israel. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(29), 11774–11778. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1302277110
- Wood, C. J., Barton, J., & Wicks, C. L. (2024). Effectiveness of social and therapeutic horticulture for reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 15, 1507354. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1507354
- American Horticultural Therapy Association. (2017). AHTA definitions and positions. https://www.ahta.org/definitions-and-positions
- Lu, S., Liu, J., Xu, M., & Xu, F. (2023). Horticultural therapy for stress reduction: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1086121. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1086121