Human-plants relationship: a kaleidoscope of values and attitudes

This paper aims to explore the relations between individuals and the world of plants in order to have a lens through which to view contemporary society and the sphere of its values and attitudes. In other words, the goal of this article is to reflect on the relevance that the world of plants has in the life of each of us and how this effect might impact on our choices at micro and macro levels. The first section outlines the main social research trends in the world of plants and in particular in plant care and the different meanings, utilizations and functions also underpinning the space where plant care happens, such as private, collective and botanic gardens. These different theoretical approaches mainly relate the Anglo-Saxon literature as it provides an interdisciplinary perspective that have allowed us to analyze the relationship between humans and the natural world in a broader and more detailed interpretive framework. The second section presents a survey, based on a structured questionnaire, we carried out during the «Mostra della Minerva», an historical and famous Italian floriculture exhibition, held in the city of Salerno (in Southern Italy); the questionnaire was administered to 383 visitors in 2017 and it aimed to explore their attitudes, motivations and values towards the world of the plants. The third and last sections illustrate the main results of this research, obtained through a descriptive and multidimensional analysis of the data, that allowed us to identify the different ways respondents approach the natural world, the system of values underpinning these behaviors and also enabled us to build a typology of visitors.