Flower Facts and Flower Information Heaven

We know we go on (and on) about it, but at Arena Flowers we really do love flowers.  Why?  Well, they make people happy, they look beautiful, they smell nice, they, erm, provide us with our livelihood - we could go on.  In a quiet moment (there aren't many here - you all want lots of bouquets!), we asked ourselves how flowers have come to hold such a special place in peoples' lives.  How did they manage it? What was their great trick?  When we realised we had no idea, we decided to ask someone who might.  Clinical psychologist and friend of Arena, Dr Charlie Hallings-Pott, gives a light-hearted explanation below telling how flowers became so entwined with our hearts and minds.

Once we'd chuckled our way through that, we got quite anoraky and decided to put together loads of information about our favourite flowers, their meanings and their history.  Click the links below to see what we found.

Flower Meanings | A to Z of Flowers | History of Flowers  

Have you ever stopped to consider the intelligence of flowers? - Dr Charlie Hallings-Pott

Well perhaps it is time you did.  As you choose your sumptuous Arena bouquet, you might want to question: ‘Who is in control here? The vegetation or me?’

Ground-breaking research from psychologist Havilland-Jones et al (2005), has revealed that flowers are deliberately exploiting humankind’s emotional niche.  Presumably, flower psychologists conducted experiments on humans and found that flowers have an unrivalled effect on our emotional and indeed cognitive well-being.  Startling results, just in, include the news that women who receive flowers have significantly more positive moods than controls, 72 hours later!  Flowers have also made themselves indispensable by improving long-term and episodic memory.

Humans are just the latest in a long line of species that flowers have exploited.  There were the bees of course, but then things got chemical.  The Datura flower (not available from Arena Flowers) emits a daily hallucinogenic ‘fix’ to ensure regular pollination from roving ‘junky’ Hawk moths.  Another breed of bat-pollinated flower humiliates the flying rodents by mimicking the sex pheromones of lady bats.

And on inevitably to the top of the food chain – us.  Only we could ensure flowers' survival, when grasses and root crops threatened to rule the Plant Kingdom.  Flowers try their bat-trick on us, and even attempt to disguise themselves as symbolic representations of female genitalia.  Flowers now have the psychic monopoly on mankind’s representation for love, sexual intent, guilt, contrition, celebration and worship.  Flowers elicit in us the famous ‘Duchenne Smile’ – a smile that is hardwired into our brains as a direct display of pleasure.  They have a hotline to our brain chemistry via a heady mixture of visual and olfactory factors.  Flowers reduce our depression, calm our fears, elicit memories and the perfect smile from childhood – and in return we let them colonise Holland.

Freud, the now largely discredited sexually-obsessed father of psychoanalysis, got it wrong again when he said: ‘Flowers are restful to look at, they have neither emotions nor conflicts’.  Little did he know, their war against our minds began, and was won, aeons ago.

Dr Charlie Hallings-Pott runs a private therapy business in Northamptonshire.
www.safeplaceuk.com.