Wardian case

The Wardian case, the direct forerunner of the modern terrarium, was invented by accident about 1829 by Dr. Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward (1791-1868), of London. Dr Ward was a physician with a passion for botany. His personally collected herbarium amounted to 25,000 specimens. The ferns in his London garden in Wellclose Square, were being poisoned by London's fumes, coal smoke, and sulfuric acid. In contrast to his flagging ferns, in the bottles where Dr. Ward kept cocoons of moths and the like, he found that fern spores were germinating and growing in a bit of soil. He had a carpenter build him a closely-fitted glazed wooden case and found that ferns grown in it thrived.

Dr. Ward published his experiment and followed it up with a book in 1842, On the Growth of Plants in Closely Glazed Cases.

English botanists and plantsmen had been passionately prospecting the world for new plants since the end of the 16th century, but these had to travel as seeds, or corms, dry rhizomes and roots. But with the new Wardian cases, it was possible that tender young plants could be set on deck to benefit from daylight, but protected from salt spray. The first test of the glazed cases was made in July 1833, when Dr. Ward shipped two specially-constructed glazed cases filled with British ferns and grasses, all the way to Sydney, Australia, a voyage of several months that found the protected plants still in good condition. Somewhat more interesting plants made the return trip, a number of Australian native species that had never survived the transportation previously. The plants arrrived in good shape, after a stormy voyage around Cape Horn.

One of Dr. Ward's correspondents was William Jackson Hooker, later director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Hooker's son Joseph Dalton Hooker was one of the first plant explorers to use the new Wardian cases, when he shipped live plants back to England from New Zealand in 1841, during the pioneering voyage of H.M.S. Erebus that circumnavigated Antarctica.

Wardian cases soon became features of stylish drawing rooms in Western Europe and the United States. In the polluted air of Victorian cities, the fern craze and the craze for growing orchids that followed owed much of their impetus to the new Wardian cases.

More importantly, the Wardian case unleashed a revolution in the mobility of garden plants. In Wardian cases, Robert Fortune shipped to British India 20,000 tea plants smuggled out of Shanghai, China, to begin the tea plantations of Assam. In Wardian cases the rubber tree of Brazil was shipped successfully to the heated glasshouses of Kew, then shipped on to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and the new British territories in Malaya to start the rubber plantations.

Dr.Ward was always active in the Society of Apothecaries of London of which he became Master in 1854. The Society still manages the Chelsea Physic Garden, London, the oldest botanical garden in the U.K.. He was a founding member both of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Microscopial Society, a Fellow of the Linnean Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

External links

Reference

D. E. Allen, The Victorian fern craze, 1969