Do plants know we're here?

So that's the impact of touching a plant on the plant.

But what about the impact on us? We've heard about the positive impacts of being around plants in general, but listener Gamit wanted to know if there's any evidence that actually touching them might be good for us.

Back at Wisley Garden, I put this to well-being and horticulture expert Ashby.

There hasn't been that much research on specifically what happens when we touch a plant.

I think we have done research on gardening.

You know, what happens if you pot a plant? What happens if you're working with your hands in the soil, touching the soil? So the act of gardening stimulates all five of our senses.

In my head, I can definitely think of plants that I don't want to touch, like stinging nettles.

Or, you know, if you go camping and the grass is really scratchy underneath you.

But yeah, I guess...

The act of hugging a tree, I don't know if you know if there's been any research on that, but it's more than just the feel of the tree or the bark against your skin.

There's also this sense of connecting with a being that's been there for a really long time.

There's a sense of feeling how you're connected to the earth beneath you.

Also, probably your face is getting a lot of smells and sights as well.

There's been research that's shown that spending time looking at nature, being in nature, it makes your problem seem smaller because you get greater perspective and you feel like you're part of something larger than yourself, a bigger ecosystem, and it can be really grounding and soothing feelings.

So maybe that's what your listener was describing, not just touching the tree, but really feeling connected to something bigger.

And I think the more we can do that in our world today, the better everyone will be.

So there is research which shows that being in nature can ground us and connect us to something bigger.

Perhaps that's part of what listener Gamit was experiencing when she hugged that tree.

There hasn't been much research which has specifically looked at the effect of touch, but we were able to find a scientist who has done one of the few studies in this area.

We wanted to find out whether different textures could produce different physiological and psychological responses.

In other words, does touching a soft lip affect us differently from touching a soft, stiff, or rough one?

This is Sin A Park, who researches the health benefits of gardening and plants at the Department of Bio and Healing Convergence at Konkuk University in Seoul, South Korea.

In her experiment, 30 adults were asked to touch soft, smooth, stiff and rough leaves on 12 plants for 90 seconds.

The plants were placed inside a box so that participants couldn't see them, allowing them to focus purely on the sensation of touch.

While they were touching the plants, we measured responses in the prefrontal cortex.