Decorating your home with flowers can benefit your senses, increase positive emotions, and highlight architectural features of your home. Now that spring cleaning is out of the way, we can have a little fun with summer flowers. But before we get to decorating tips, let’s take a moment to appreciate the benefits of flowers.

Benefits to Your Senses: Your five senses are sure to thank you when you decorate your home with flowers. Brightly colored flowers improve visual stimulation, which can increase a positive emotional response. Studies show that the scent of many flowers activate nerve cells that trigger brain activity related to memory, attention, and emotion. Many people find the gentle touch needed to properly arrange flowers to have a relaxing effect.

Increase Positive Emotions: Flowers have been shown to have a positive effect on your emotional state. Studies found that people were happier, more compassionate, and had reduced stress levels when they awoke to freshly cut flowers. Choosing flowers with a particular scent can help you trigger happy memories. For example, decorating your home with flowers from your wedding bouquet, can make you smile and remember that wonderful day.

Highlight Architectural Features: What better way to highlight your home’s best features than with freshly cut flowers or a flowering plant? Flowers are a fantastic way to emphasize creative nook areas, showcase beautifully adorned cabinets, or compliment bathroom and kitchen spaces. Just as the right clothes can highlight a person’s best features, so too can flowers show-off your home’s best attributes.

Home Decorating Tips

• Orchids are calming and are therefore ideal in tranquil spaces and bedrooms. Orchid plants respire and give off oxygen at night, making them perfect for the bedroom.

• Bold, vibrant paint colors are trending right now.  Experiment with jewel tone floral combinations to play against a brightly colored accent wall. Mokora orchids, purple/fuschia Stock and Gerbera Daisies come to mind.

• Choose contrasting flowers to complement your existing home decor. For example, if you have green furniture or walls, choose an Iris, Delphinium, Hydrangea, or another flower with blue petals. Blue flowers will make the green truly pop.

• Sunflowers look amazing with taupe furniture and also brighten up a sparsely lit space.

• Add Succulents to a fresh cut flower arrangement to make a summer statement.

• Low profile containers overflowing with fluffy flowers are striking in a white or neutral room. A  monochrome bunch of Peonies, Hydrangea or the amazingly fragrant Stock will do the trick. All three are available in multiple colors.

• Float just the heads of flowers in a favorite dish on a coffee table or bathroom vanity. Orchids of any species work well, as do Sunflowers, Mums, Daisies, Peonies, and Roses. Succulents, too.

• Group multiple containers of varying heights with one flower type and/or color as a centerpiece.

• Freshly cut flowers in tall glass vases in corners or entryways fill space and provide sweet smelling aromas in the room. Stargazers or any of the other Asiatic or Oriental lilies have exotic scents and they have tall stalks with multiple flowers on each one.

• Go straight up green for a modern, clean look. There are some really gorgeous, completely green flowers available in summer including many rose varieties, Green Trick Dianthus, and large or mini Green Hydrangea.