The Impact of Our Giant Flower Installations in a Health and Wellbeing Environment.
Hospitals are places of care and healing, but they can also be unfamiliar, clinical and emotionally difficult environments for patients and the people who come to visit them.
At Giant Flowers Ireland, we have always believed that flowers can do more than decorate a space. They can change how a space feels.
Our giant floral installation at St James’s Hospital Dublin is perhaps one of the clearest examples of this.
Standing prominently within the hospital, the installation combines towering red roses, a large white bloom and rich green foliage. Against the functional surroundings of a busy healthcare environment, the scale and colour immediately create contrast — something unexpected, natural in inspiration and visually uplifting.
But what has mattered most to us is not simply how the flowers look.
It is how people feel when they see them.
Bringing Colour Into a Healthcare Environment
Anyone who regularly visits a hospital understands that the experience is about far more than medical treatment. Patients may be anxious about appointments or procedures. Families may be waiting for news. Visitors may be supporting someone they love, while healthcare professionals spend long and demanding days caring for others.
The physical environment surrounding all of those people matters.
Research increasingly supports this idea. A 2025 review examining visual art in healthcare environments found reported benefits for patients, staff and visitors, including wellbeing and positive distraction. Earlier research into hospital environments has similarly found that certain visual interventions can help reduce anxiety, stress and pain. PubMed
Research into evidence-based art has also found that patients often show a preference for imagery associated with nature and natural scenes. PubMed
Our giant flowers are not living plants, and we would never claim that an installation itself provides a medical benefit. But these findings reinforce something we have experienced repeatedly through our work: what surrounds people can influence how a place feels.
And sometimes a burst of colour, a familiar form from nature and something beautiful to focus on can provide a welcome interruption to an otherwise clinical environment.
When a Visitor Contacted Us
We recently received an unexpected message through Instagram from Blue Lotus Therapy, following a visit to St James’s Hospital.
For us, feedback like this carries particular weight.
The installation wasn’t created for social-media engagement or simply to fill an empty area. It exists physically within a working hospital, where thousands of people move through the environment for very different reasons.
Knowing that somebody noticed the flowers and felt strongly enough about their effect to find Giant Flowers Ireland and contact us afterwards demonstrates the kind of impact thoughtful visual installations can have.
It transforms the flowers from something people simply see into something they experience.
A Moment Worth Capturing
That interaction isn’t an isolated example. Irish social-media personality and content creator Dylan Lee Kenny, known for his humorous online content and larger-than-life personality, also stopped for a photograph with our giant flowers while visiting a friend at St James’s Hospital. Kenny has developed a significant following through his comedy-led TikTok and social-media content and has increasingly appeared within Ireland’s entertainment and social scene. Apple Podcasts
What we particularly love about this photograph is the circumstances behind it. Dylan wasn’t attending a Giant Flowers Ireland event or visiting the hospital to see our installation — he was simply visiting a friend in hospital. Yet the flowers caught his attention and became somewhere to stop and take a photograph together.
It is another small but very real example of what we mean by positive visual impact. In a place people primarily associate with appointments, illness and treatment, something colourful and unexpected can create a completely different kind of moment — one worth stopping for, sharing and remembering.
A Positive Distraction
There is an interesting concept within healthcare design known as positive distraction — giving someone’s attention something pleasant or engaging to rest upon within an environment that might otherwise create stress.
Visual art and nature-inspired elements have both been studied in this context. A recent review of nature exposure during hospital stays found a small but meaningful therapeutic effect, particularly in psychological measures such as anxiety, pain and patient satisfaction, while acknowledging that the evidence varies considerably between different interventions. PubMed Central (PMC)
That idea helps explain why installations such as ours can belong in spaces beyond weddings, festivals and corporate events.
A giant flower is deliberately impossible to overlook.
Its exaggerated scale takes something familiar and changes it into something unexpected. People stop. They look upwards. They notice the individual petals. They photograph it. They talk about it.
For a moment, their attention is somewhere else.
Giant Flowers With a Different Purpose
We love seeing our flowers transform weddings, festivals, restaurants and events across Dublin. But seeing them within a health and wellbeing environment gives the work another dimension.
Here, the objective isn’t simply to create a spectacular backdrop.
It is about bringing colour, nature-inspired forms, warmth and personality into an environment where those qualities can have particular meaning.
Giant Flowers and Creative Ageing at MISA
Our connection with creativity and wellbeing at St James’s Hospital extends beyond the main floral installation. Giant Flowers Ireland also created background scenery at the Mercer’s Institute for Successful Ageing (MISA) for a Creative Ageing event.
MISA is much more than a clinical facility for older people. Creative Life is one of the Institute’s four central pillars, bringing creativity into the experience of ageing through art, music, poetry, sculpture, drama and other forms of creative expression. Its work reflects a broader understanding that successful ageing isn’t concerned solely with physical health, but also with participation, identity, expression and quality of life. FlipHTML5
The Creative Life programme has also developed a longstanding partnership with the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) around art, ageing and health. That collaboration, dating back to 2017, has championed the role creativity can play in enhancing health, wellbeing and quality of life within clinical environments and throughout people’s lives. IMMA
For Giant Flowers Ireland, providing the floral background scenery for a Creative Ageing event therefore felt particularly appropriate. Our oversized flowers became part of an environment specifically created to celebrate creativity, ageing and wellbeing — the same principles that make visual installations so interesting within healthcare spaces in the first place.
It can be a bright moment on the way to an appointment.
A landmark that becomes familiar to a regular visitor.
Something for a child to point towards.
A photograph to send someone.
Or simply something beautiful encountered during a difficult day.
Those small interactions are difficult to measure — but they matter.
Creating Spaces People Remember
The message we received from Blue Lotus Therapy reminded us why permanent and long-term floral installations have become such an important part of what we do at Giant Flowers Ireland.
We don’t simply make oversized flowers.
We create visual features capable of changing the character of a space.
From hospitals and healthcare environments to hotels, retail spaces, restaurants, corporate foyers and public buildings, our giant flowers can be designed around the surroundings, installed for extended periods and changed seasonally to keep the environment fresh.
Our flowers are also reusable, allowing the same handcrafted pieces to be incorporated into different installations rather than being created as single-use event décor.
The St James’s Hospital installation demonstrates that statement décor doesn’t always have to shout.
Sometimes its greatest impact is simply making someone feel a little better when they walk past.
And in a health and wellbeing environment, that may be the most meaningful impact of all.
