Each year the Garden Media Group, a marketing firm for the home and garden industry, identifies key gardening trends for the coming season. For 2017 they’ve pegged eight of these around the theme of “Grow 365,” reflecting “people’s desire to bring health and wellness into their everyday lives all year long.”
Growing food indoors
“From growing arugula to bok choy, clean fresh food will be available to plant, pick and plate every season. … From herbal tea gardens on the windowsill and healing herbs under lights to vitamin-packed microgreens on the kitchen counter, medicinal gardens are blooming indoors.”
Already, “37 percent of millennials and 28 percent of boomers are growing herbs indoors.” They cite the statistic that two-thirds of parents feel children should be involved with activities relating to healthy food.
The indoor gardening market has grown 8.2 percent in the last five years. “According to the 2016 IKEA Life at Home Report, 60 percent of people worldwide grow vegetables or flowers indoors.”
Using nature for wellness
One way they predict many will do this is through “forest bathing” — “a cornerstone of preventive health care and natural healing in Japanese medicine,” developed there in the 1980s.
“Forest bathing is the medicine of being in the forest and spending time in nature awakening all five senses.”
Using trees to “soundscape” — adding pleasant sounds or reducing annoying ones — is another wellness trend. Trees also act as a sunscreen, providing the equivalent of an SPF-10 lotion. Plants in workplaces, they predict, will continue to be added.
“Indoor office plants create healthier and happier workers, lower healthcare costs, increase productivity, lower absenteeism and reduce turnover.”
Tidying
Taken from the Japanese art of decluttering and organizing, and the book by Marie Kondo, “tidy gardens does not mean trimmed hedges and clean corners. It simply reflects a global shift toward reduced consumption coupled with finding bliss…
