Spring IN!

O Spring, we emerge
from our Winter nests hungry
for your vibrant growth

Mother Nature is awakening all around us, as Winter’s cold stillness transforms into a flurry of innumerable births. Springtime, the season of the Wood element, is tremendously revitalizing, the ultimate green drink for the spirit. That ‘spring in our step’ is real as we respond to a world of new life unfurling around us.

As Spring works her magic on us outdoors, let’s complete the circle and invite her effervescence IN! All kinds of arrangements of springtime plants can bring the choreography of the season into our homes. Happily rooted in earth, indoor gardens express the fullness of the Wood element’s upward growth and bright enthusiasm. The minerals in the soil represent the Metal element, while water and sunlight activate the Water and Fire elements. With all five elements present, the true beauty of Spring in Action is ours to behold, up close and personal!

As Essential Feng Shui® Ch’i enhancements, interior plants can provide culinary, ornamental, and air-purifying benefits. When choosing plants for an indoor Spring garden, consider combining herbs, flowers, and foliage together in one container. Herbal plants such as parsley, basil, oregano, and thyme can be snipped to flavor and garnish our meals. Many Spring flowers are also edible, including pansies, nasturtium, and violets, making our salads blossom with color and exotic tastes. Every leaf on a healthy green plant helps to clean the air in our homes. Most herbs and flowering plants require daily sun, so if a sunny place isn’t available inside, choose shade-loving flowers such as orchids, kalanchoes, cyclamens, bromeliads or peace lillies and combine them with houseplants like ferns, pothos, ivy, and Chinese evergreens.

Interior gardens can also catalyze personal growth. Ask: “What do these lovely plants symbolize in my life?” “How would I describe the new seeds that are sprouting within me?” “What flower best symbolizes my own growth?” Questions such as these can open the portal to the extraordinary ordinary, where a dishgarden becomes a pathway to self-discovery. Discoveries can be formed into affirmations and tucked under or posted near our Spring gardens. In so doing, we are planting our intentions solidly in place and caring for them as they grow and blossom. When we Spring IN, we are preparing for the full flowering of our lives.

This shade-loving Spring garden created by WSFS Programs Director Liv Kellgren includes a bright orange bromeliad, budding kalanchoe, and edible thyme. Her affirmation card says: I am growing like a garden, budding, flowering expressing my unique colors, and above all, I am growing in my own time.