Plants in Bedrooms.

Manawatu Standard, Volume IX, Issue 114, 18 April 1885, Page 4

Plants m Bedrooms.

The controversy as to keeping live plants m a room at night (the Globe says) .continues to be carried on with vigour and with acrimony, although most people have probably supposed that it was long since set At rest. Not so very many years ago the danger of keeping such things m a bed room was a good deal pooh-poohed by practical persons, who regarded the stories told m that connection as old woman's tales, belonging to the same category as the myth about sleeping under the moon, or taking a siesta under a yew tree. But then there were published terrible accounts of fair dames who, despising the warning m question, and depositing bouquets or flower pots m their rooms at night, had met with a fate almost as tragic as that recorded m the doleful ballad of "The Mistleto Bough." Thereupon the scientific world, with the whole crew of unlearned folk at its heels, rushed to the opposite conclusion, and adopted a theory that illness, and even death, might reult from sleeping m an apart ment which was adorned with living plants and fresh cuttings. And now it turns out that m going as far as this we have gone a great deal too far. At a medical conference recently held m France, it was demonstrated to the satisfaction of all the servants there present that plants, as long as they are plants only, may- safely, and even with advantage, be admitted to the elysium from which they !have so often ' been exiled. These pretty ornaments, as a learned writer now declares, "far from being hurtful, are beneficial inasmuch as they exhale a certain ozone and vapour, which maintain a healthy dampness m the air, and besides that are destuctive of the microbes which promote consumptive tendencies m human beings. It is only flowers, and not the plants which bear them, that do the damage. Ferns are innocuous! roses and sunflowers are pernicious — at least, during the interesting period while they are m bloom."