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Your Garden: How the Terrarium Changed the World

By Gregg Harris

Don’t you just love all the wonderful plants we have available to us today?

It hasn’t always been like this. In the 1820s there was a 95% failure rate whenever you tried to transport a live plant across the ocean. Salt spray, temperature and lack of light in the hold of the ship would cause nine out of ten attempts to end in failure. That is, until the discovery of the terrarium in 1829.

A 19th Century print of a terrarium. El Barocco/ Adobe Stock 253380099
A 19th Century print of a terrarium.
El Barocco/ Adobe Stock 253380099

Dr. Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward of London, England was given the pupae of a moth to hatch.

This particular moth went through its metamorphosis under ground. So, Dr. Ward placed moist soil in the bottom of a large jar, nestled his pupae into the soil, and then, because he was concerned it might hatch while he was away, he put the lid on the jar.

When Dr. Ward placed the lid on his jar that day he changed history.

In fact, he shifted the geopolitical balance of power among nations. Trillions of dollars changed hands and millions of lives were saved, all within just a few decades and all because he put the lid on the jar.

Ward had accidentally created a terrarium. When he came back to check on his moth a few weeks later, he discovered little ferns growing out of the soil. If it had just been a weed or a few blades of grass, he would not have thought much about it, but it happened to be the very ferns that he had been trying to cultivate for several years, unsuccessfully. He decided to watch and see how long the ferns could grown inside the closed jar and they thrived for nearly four years!

During those four years he got an idea. He thought, “If I can keep my ferns growing so happily in nothing but a jar, maybe I could design and build a glass cargo case for transporting live plants across the oceans.” That is what he did. His invention became know as the Wardian Case Terrarium. It worked so well that anyone could transport any plant from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world without losing any at all.

Today we enjoy a vast array of agricultural, medicinal, landscape and houseplants without much thought as to how they all got here. But it all happened because one man put a lid on a jar.

Gregg Harris the owner of Silver Falls Terrariums in Silverton, Oregon. www.silverfallsterrariums.com

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